Travelling Fearfully

An expedition such as the one I planned was not to be taken lightly.  History hasn't bothered to record the names of those who failed.  They fell unnoticed and their bones now bleach under a hostile sun.  More than once I had turned back at the very start, fear, or perhaps wisdom, driving me back to my home.

This time, however, I was determined.  I had put my affairs in order, dressed in dull, hard wearing clothing and dug out my father's old service revolver.  It would be of no use against the hazards I must face but in the final extremity the single round loaded into the chamber could be my last and dearest friend.

Thus equipped I set forth.  Before I was ready the bridge stretched before me and my courage almost failed me.  Nobody still living remembers when the bridge was built or why.  We only know to guard it.  The soldiers were tense, nervous, weapons at the ready.  They didn't try and stop me as I placed one foot on the bridge, suicide prevention isn't part of their duties.

My god the bridge seemed narrow, a thin ribbon stretched across the fetid, deadly river that separated our lands from, the other.  No rushing, foam flecked cascade this.  It was a thick, hateful ooze, dark and malevolent.  Touch not one drop the old tales warned us.  Drink nothing, eat nothing caught and don't stare too long into its dark turgid depths.  If you do you may see the souls of those who disobeyed these strictures staring back at you screaming eternally and futilely for release.

I hurried across the bridge as swiftly as I dared, praying the aging structure wouldn't abruptly collapse and carry me to my doom in the gangrenous flow beneath.  Once across, before I could change my mind, I turned my back on home and set forth.  If my heart hammered in my chest I tried not to let it show on my face.  The lairs of those who inhabited this fell place were all around me and the smell of fear was sweet to their nostrils. 

The very weather spat at me, flecks of rain from a cloudless sky.  Heat and cold followed each other with apparently no interest in the natural passing of seasons.  Around me the ugly lumps of rock that housed the grim residents pressed on me with a relentless force.  Temples to strange gods glared at me as I passed, blank stone radiating hate.  I hoped their priests needed no sacrifice today.

The hillside rose before me, I needed to climb, descend and climb again before I could reach my goal.  I struck out trusting, of necessity, to a map that owed as much to imagination as cartography.  I trusted too readily, I was lost in a maze of hateful dwellings twisting and reaching to snag the unwary.  I dared not go back, I was running on bluff.  Retreat would show uncertainty and uncertainty would be death.  Trying not to show my desperation I struck uphill roughly towards my goal in the hopes that I could once again encounter the faint trace of a path that my map boldly presented as a road.

Upward I forged, gaining in confidence as the ridgetop neared.  Abruptly I stopped.  Sprawled in my path was one of the denizens of this dark realm.  A hulking form, blue and black its misshapen form knotted with muscle.  I froze but it made no move, dare I hope it was asleep?  With infinite caution I eased past and as I did so a lid peeled back from a single bloodshot, yellow eye.  For a minute it studied me with lazy hostility but then the lid rolled back.  Indolence had conquered hunger, for the moment.  Trying not to run, not to scream, not to sob I moved on towards the top of the ridge.

As I reached the summit a temple to death, openly worshipped in this mad place, rose proud and grim, the finest building I had yet seen.  Keeping my gaze averted I hastened along the ridge seeking the path down into the next valley that my fickle map had promised me.  A path?  A thin, twisting strand clinging to a hillside eager to be rid of it.  I made my way down with as much care as my jangled nerves permitted.  Blank rock rose on my right.  On the left?  A tangled mass of vegetation; grass, vines and trees writhing and knotting together in hate filled competition for the poisoned moisture in the corpse fed soil.

Unbidden a memory struck me like a blow.  Of two small children wandering lost and tearful amid this same hateful greenery with the grass itself reaching out to smother this young flicker of life.  Bathed in sweat and blinking away sudden tears I hurried on, desperate to put the place behind me.  I crossed a second bridge almost without being aware of it.  There was a stream at the bottom of this second valley.  There were no stories of it being poisonous or a prison for the souls of the long dead.  There were no stories about it at all.  I was desperate and chanced a drink.  It was thick, dark and warm but death didn't come.

For the first time since I started I allowed myself a sliver of hope.  More than half my journey was completed and surely it was the worse half.  Rejuvenated I moved forward, my path would have been accounted a road in this world  and I passed along swiftly enough never stopping to look at the dwellings that glowered down from above.  Ahead of me was more than a road, it was a thoroughfare thronging with a mass of warped, devilish beings.  Yet I must pass along it or wander helpless in the wildlands without even a path to provide comfort.

Alien eyes, some fierce, some sullen but all hostile bored into me as I strode down the thoroughfare with a confidence I was far from feeling.  Even as I left them behind I could hear the silent words those eyes shouted at me as I passed.
"This is our domain stranger," the eyes proclaimed.  "You are here on sufferance, a sufferance that can be rescinded at any time for any reason or no reason at all.  Be afraid!"

I was afraid but I walked on, my destination now beckoned and once there I could ignore those eyes and laugh at their threat.  I was so close in my mind's eye I had already arrived, then my map failed me completely.  Where it said there should be a path there was instead a wall of trees, bare limbed and twisted blocking my way.  Retreat wasn't an option, not with those hungry, hostile eyes behind me.  With despair filled bravado I plunged between the trees driving forward hard and defying the danger.  Reptilian things scuttled and slithered from my path as I forced my way forward.  Trees loomed up and I barely bothered to avoid them, slapping aside branches and vines as I passed.  Whether born of fear, despair or anger this burst of aggression carried me through and beyond the trees I found the house I sought.  The dark forces of this land withdrew more in surprise than defeat.

Before me was my destination and to greet me, dear friends.  What on earth possessed Morganne and Kate to move to Bexley?  I swear to god next time I'm going to take the bus.