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In The Land Of The Dead
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 1

In the land of the dead, the world is a lifeless grey, and the sky is the colour of tears, pricked out by the black points of the stars.

In the land of the dead, the grey mountains rise up to the colourless sky from the endless plains, and the rivers wind sluggish and black as night, from the beginning of eternity to its end. Wind does not blow, nor does anything grow, in the land of the dead.

In the land of the dead, the ghosts stand, on every crag and rock, unmoving. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go, except wait till the end of time. And who knows what happens then? Not even the ghosts know.

I stood on my own crag, turning slowly under that lightless sky, my anguish in me like a slow-burning fire, and yet I could do nothing to quench it. If I’d still had a voice I would have screamed aloud, and if I’d still had eyes I might have wept, but I was nothing but a wisp, one among untold billions, without even a name.

I did not know how long it was since I’d been dead, or whether I’d been here from the moment of my physical extinction – but I was here now, and too full of sorrow not to despair.

I still remembered, faintly, the moment of my death, of the heavy motorcycle between my legs leaning as I swept round the bend, and the car coming, fast, too fast, on the wrong side of the road, too fast for me to do anything, and the world swinging completely round once my head as I was flung from the saddle. After that there was nothing – until now.

I could still see her face, though, could still feel the pulling inside me, to be with her. We’d had troubles, bad troubles, the kind that killed relationships and destroyed lives, but we’d healed them, we’d come through, we’d had a fresh future together. And I’d been on my way to her, to see her again, the joy of anticipation singing in my blood, when it had happened. I could imagine her, waiting, impatience giving way to annoyance, worry and then stark fear. She would still be waiting for me when the message came. She would wait forever.

But we would never meet again, for there is no marker of identity, no recognition, in the land of the dead.

Far in the distance, in whichever direction I looked, the mountains rose in serried ranks, their slopes crowded with the ghosts, who stood in such profusion on them that their outlines were blurred and misted. And below my crag, the plain was cracked and fissured with aeons of drought, and through it a broad black river flowed slowly. This, then, was what I would know for the rest of eternity, in the land of the dead.

The anguish rose in me again, tearing me apart, and I could tolerate it no longer. The pain folded me up and tumbled me off my crag. I drifted like thistledown towards the distant plain, uncaring of what happened to me. I wished I could feel physical pain, for that would have been a blessing, a release. But there was nothing of that.

I came to rest on a ridge of rock by the river, where another ghost stood, a wisp of a grey stain in the grey air. It twisted slowly as I came down, and though it had no face, I felt its distant, disinterested scrutiny. And, so faintly that I could hardly hear it, came a breath of a voice.

"Despair and anguish – those are our constant companions," it said. "It would be better that you accepted it, for your own sake."

"Then is there no escape?" I asked. "Does the pain not grow dimmer with the passage of time?"

For so long was the ghost silent that I thought it would no longer speak. "There is no time here," it said at last. "No years, and no seasons. Nothing passes by, and there is no dissolution. Nothing grows dimmer, for there is no time to wash the pain away. Only the river flows, endlessly."

I looked down to the river, and its lifeless black depths, which seemed to suck the grey out of the air and the darkness from the stars. "Whence does the river flow," I asked, "and where does it go?"

"That is not something we know, or can tell," the ghost whispered, its voice like the rubbing of desert sands. "The river comes out of eternity and returns to it."

[ Continue to page 2 ]

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Information
Genre:General Horror
Type:Short story
Rating:7.42 / 10
Rated By:29 users
Comments: 1 user
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