words | john ricciardi    pictures | patrick rocard   music | alastair stout

As in any unprecedented escape, the most fearsome obstacles were internal. He was thrashing in he knew not what- a flood of mud, or quicksand, or slime, or worse. He could see nothing. The instant he stopped he sank and choked, had to bang at his brain to keep his body perpendicular to the current. When he splayed on his back, tree limbs or animal paws caught at his wrists. Each time he turned on his breast to stroke, rasping projections like mantis lips or tongued leeches tried to slip into his mouth. He bobbed and kicked and smothered and flipped in the thick black ooze that stung his eyes and plugged his mouth and nose and ears and forever sucked him under while his senses screamed to give up and be pulled in.

No one ever got free, any foundered but he. He could roll through the muck to where the current dragged harder, ever closer to the river's swift core, could sift breath through clenched teeth, pressure bursting lungs with cracking ribs, and swat the hellish brew with splintering bones. The current beat at him like a banshee. He struggled just below the surface the way a fly might attempt to move wings trapped in resin. Mistaken as to the crossing's breadth, he rammed the far bank with his head and sank. Tearing through the dark, carving chunks of the river wall with hand and foot, he wrenched out from the sticky mire to pull up on the shore.

Inside his body's heap, his pulse sounded a deafening drum. He heard past the banging the whine of an insect swarm, felt the stings as they settled. But he never expected wave after wave to come upon him like living blankets, to force him to his feet or have him crushed under their incommensurable sum of pain. He ran wildly from where he thought the river haunted his back, shedding the living, foreign skin as he staggered across inky holes in the ground and smashed against invisible buttresses. With his fists jutted forward, his mouth agape, and his eyes closed, he stubbed his feet, padded flatly, lurched on rocks, and went stumbling on and on and on. His inhalation shortened like a ruler fracturing at either end. His mind seemed a red dot in his skull fed by his heart and lungs pumping in the darkness. Alone but for agony and the mad rush of flight, he fought the shadows and the blank deterrents to his path.

All at once, there was only cold and the din within. The earth beneath his feet was level and empty. A few, blind steps brought his fingers and his cheek against a sheer, vertical face. No salient blemished the smooth ellipse. No handhold met his nails. He palmed across, to infinity for all he cared, until the bitter cold would cut his limbs from under him. He soon lost count and any inkling of the distance described in the extent of his reach. The simple measure of his body heat draining like an hourglass would clock the limits of this exploration. Futile repetition debilitated him like broken joints; and the whistle of time seeping away was cruel. Numb and dulled deathly, he went creeping like the hours.

On his knees but still sidling, pressed yet against the monolithic cliff, he heard the rustle of sobs not his own. He found a soft column in the hard face with shapes moving in a waterfall of souls. He climbed upon the descending forms, tugged and kicked loose from their desperate clawing. He was beyond knowing how fast they flowed beneath him; he might have climbed two body lengths or a mountain.

Only then did he hear over the moans and sighs a hideous growl above. Still there was no light to guide him, just a shift in the angle of the climb. He had reached the lip of the precipice. The snarling surrounded him like a cloud. One hand was crushed in a hot vice of teeth. A different muzzle snapped the other. Huge jaws seized his head, enclosed his features, latched onto his temples. He pounded his legs on the broken stream, pummelled with his lower limbs like pistons spinning a log. The horror of the lacerating bites stifled the last strength in his legs.

No matter, he dragged himself on the ground, burrowed beneath his captor's belly. His head exploding, his arms pinned behind, he wormed and writhed for the last scratch of terrain that could be won before the blackness took him. The earth fell away from his chest; he tumbled down; the grip on his upper extremities tore free.

Naked and dumb, he slid like rubble down a shoal of little pebbles. It was as if a shade had been pulled behind, a page or a corner turned. Hope long since had shattered. His eyes burned and blurred; but abruptly he had light enough to descry a hint, a thin, wavery, silvery sliver of horizon.