Read Online Letters From Hades by Jeffrey Thomas - Free Book Online Page A

desire.
    I spent the night, as I chose to call the hours of my rest, in a cave-like hollow at the base of a large tree that had fallen years before, either rotted out or struck by lightning. If it was charred, the evidence was covered over in a purplish moss that had blanketed the great trunk. The hollow wasn’t very deep, but deep enough to shelter me when it rained. The rain was water, this time, not blood. Caroline and I had finished the wine but I’d saved the bottle, and I set it out in the rain to collect some of the water. Not a lot accumulated, but I was grateful for it.
    Then in the day I set out again in what I hoped was still the correct direction. Maybe we should have stuck to the path after all. It was only perhaps an hour after leaving my night’s shelter that the arrow hit me.
    It’s a crossbow bolt, actually. What do they call that—a quarrel? Too short to be an arrow, almost like a long dart. The tip must be ruthlessly barbed, because after it had spun me to the ground and I had taken hold of it, I found I couldn’t pull it out without tearing myself inside. It had pierced through to the back of my rib cage, and I think in fact it is lodged in one of them.
    I desperately clawed my way back to my feet, and plunged onward into the woods, frantic to outrun my hunter. My lungs burned so badly I wondered if they were filling with blood. Any moment I expected a second bolt to thunk squarely into the back of my skull…
    No more bolts came. I lost the hunter. Not needing my flesh for food, my skin for leather, he was not inspired to rouse himself much from his easy play.
    That was hours ago. I’ve stopped bleeding, but the razored flange still rubs against my muscles. Grinds at my bone like a knife across a whetstone. There is no real need for doctors, but I can only hope there are people in Oblivion willing to lend aid…
    I find it ironic that I helped that Demon, by removing the spear I still carry from her body. But there is no one here to help me.
    I’ve sat down here on this rock splotched in bluish lichen to rest. To finish the last sip of water from my bottle. I hope to emerge from these desolate woods soon. What if they go on and on for mile after mile, a forest wider than all the continents of the Earth combined? I feel that Hell is bigger than the Earth…despite what they say about there being more people alive on the Earth now than have ever died before them. All this room is waiting to be filled by the many successive generations yet to arrive. Maybe then these forests will be cleared to make way for more towns like Caldera, cities like Oblivion.
    I’m caught up now in my journal. No excuse to remain here any longer. And I still fear that Angel catching up with me. So—onward.
    Later.
    I don’t know how many hours I walked through the woods; perhaps it was longer than a day. Eventually, accidentally, I found myself back on the path through the forest, though maybe it was a different path. It was broader, after all, and even rutted with wheels of apparently various kinds. And straight…so straight that in its distance I could see Oblivion rising from the horizon.
    Earlier I mentioned how the spiral-branded baboon-like devils remind me of the flying monkeys from the film of The Wizard of Oz.  It was easy for me to run further with that film as a frame of reference; after all, my surroundings were so patently unreal, as if I had been transported onto some immense and detailed sound stage. The woods reminded me of the haunted forest Dorothy and her friends passed through, and the city beyond the edge of the great forest now put me in mind of the Emerald City as it appeared at the end of the yellow brick road.
    But the gold bricks of the road had all been carted away, and the Emerald City had seen better days.
    Oblivion was a city of blackness. As I drew closer—though it would be several hours yet before I actually reached the city; it seemed as far away as boiling dark storm clouds—this