Dreams of Falling Down

He woke up in free fall, the smell of sulphur invaded his sinuses as he fell through a pillar of black smoke towards the ground below.

He saw others falling with him, flailing limbs and screaming, All now brothers and sisters in their confused descent. He frantically took in his surroundings, a barren crimson landscape slashed with fissures and sink holes of indeterminate depth, pocked with fires as if a thousand volcanoes had congregated on the same plain to spew forth a hateful choir of ash and smoke. The sun was setting in an orange sky and was beautiful, though none of those who would bare witness to it would find any solace in it. He fell.

The ground approached closer every second, rushing to meet him. With a sonorous crack the landscape beneath split and widened, prolonging his descent further as the earth itself swallowed him.

He heard sickening organic cracks as bodies slapped wetly against the jagged lip of the widening crevice, their screams cut abruptly short.

Fewer of them now, falling into darkness. The rock walls were honeycombed with black tunnels where slithering things shifted and moved in the fading light.

Gargantuan, elongated arms reached out from holes in cliff walls and snatched many of the men and women away, eager as starving men might reach thin arms to pluck ripe apples from branches to hurriedly gnash them between avaricious teeth.

He fell, Alone now. The light growing dimmer, surrounded by all together alien, predatory sounds of things no nightmare would ever dare if only to save the sanity of the dreamer.

Darkness enveloped him. The light feared this place and so had fled from it, abandoning him to be blind as the wind cut his face and his ears rang with guttural howling.

Then as a last gift, or curse, the sun shed a final beam of light downwards to expose what would be his final resting place. A pool of black water rimmed with white stone resembling rows of serrated teeth set in a necrotic black gum line.

His frantic thoughts wondered if he would be killed by the impact with the subterranean lake or if he would survive, slipping into its unknown depths to be swallowed whole or torn to ragged chunks by whatever pale, eyeless creatures may live in it.

He was very close now, he counted down in his head... 3....2....1... and for the first time in his fall from grace, he screamed.

He woke in his bed with a start, panting hard and looking about the room. His gaze stopped on his…mother's face, her short blonde hair, her glacial blue eyes, her wide smile.

“good morning sweetheart”

his mother said with a grin that bled benevolence.

“i didn't want to wake you but it seemed you were having a bad dream”

she said with all the concern that loving mothers show a child waking from a nightmare.

“well its time to get up, big day ahead of you"

she said as she walked out of the room, casting a final loving smile as she disappeared down the hall.

It was at this moment he understood exactly where he was. His mother was dead, many years dead and he had not mourned her passing, not once. For him to be in the same place as that woman meant only one thing.

Yes, he knew exactly where he was, and for the second time that day, he screamed.