At the End of One’s Woe – [Ch.02] Woe Is She
Wednesday’s eyes shot open as the clock struck 3 AM. She had discovered long ago how conducive this stretch of night was for her work, whether it was hammering away at the pages of her novel or returning a borrowed body back to its grave. There was something different about this time that she had never been able to pinpoint. Maybe it was how the cold air always seemed to make her fingers work faster in an attempt to stave off the chill. Perhaps it was the freedom she found to act whilst under the dark veil that the night imparted. But most likely, it was the peace that these hours offered she found the most attractive.
However, this hour stood different from others, this night a straw of hay in a stack full of needles. Try as she might, she was unable to recall the last time she had not been awake at this juncture. What also proved troubling were the circumstances surrounding her slumber and eventual stir–how they remained shrouded in the blinding white that was currently affronting her pupils.
The only explanation that Wednesday could rationalize was that she had woken up in Hell. It explained why the last things she remembered seeing were inscrutable figures flailing along to a klaxon’s relentless wail. It was the reason for the unbearable weight on her chest and the dogged heat lapping at her extremities. It accounted for the hungry breath bathing her face–the eager maw behind it surely belonging to Cerberus himself.
She was ecstatic.
Finally, Hell.
But, as her vision cleared and her senses returned, she found herself not in the fabled land of perdition, but in an even more compromising scenario. The young moppets that spun through her head were not demons sent to mock her, but the ghosts of videos past, rising from a now blackened phone screen to haunt her dreams. The weight that pressed against her ribs belonged not to the same stones that had crushed Giles Corey, but to the arm of the young ingenue beside her. And the breath that threatened her own supply of oxygen? The rasp that filled her ears and rumbled the bed? Those came from a different breed of canine entirely.
It wasn’t Hell she was in.
It was somewhere even worse.
meviesdust
