The Painted Picture

The young girl stood in the mud-track road, and behind her the landscape was on fire.

"Let me pass", I shouted over the roar, but she just looked at me, her head on one side, her dark hair flat against her skin.

"Let me pass", I shouted, and my horse reared, its eyes and nostril wide, sweat matting its hair (and in the mud ran streams of water mixed with streams of blood).

"You cannot pass" replied the girl, and her voice was quiet but rang like a bell.

(In the distance the villages were burning, and people were screaming and running from the tall, dark, crooked figures that followed them in jerking steps)

"Please let me pass", I shouted once more, my eyes in the distance; I had to help.

"You cannot pass" the girl said again, and this time the earth shook with her voice.

I looked at her, at those empty black eyes, as lightening shook the sky above us. "Who are you?" I whispered. The girl did not reply, but continued to look at me, her face blank and relaxed. "Why are you doing this?" I shouted, and my horse reared again as I stuggled to control it.

"It is not me" her voice was high, petulant, "this is your doing, surely you know that?"

And then I screamed and the edges of my vision began to curl and blacken like burning paper, and the scene behind the girl began to fall apart so that there was only me and her. And as burning strips fell from the sky she moved closer: her skin flayed then dissolved away, and her jaw stretched forward until her face was like that of a horse; her arms extended to a grotesque length, and her hands turned into fleshy claws.

The creature reached towards me and I could not move. It was blind, but its talons sought my eyes, grasping my forehead. We were joined; my torso growing out of its body, and all around us there seemed to be fire and smoke, though all was blackness (yet rented with a sick unnatural light). We were falling backwards, down, down, as the horses mouth moved towards mine, its lips curling back in hatred.

I was lost.

This was Hell.