The Fall
Photo by Kenneth Surillo / Pexels
Author: Demi-Louise Blackburn
Card: The World
“Don’t ever go looking at your reflection,” Nana Eddie once said, pointing at the stagnant garden pond. “Won’t do you any good. Some things we aren’t meant to know about ourselves.”
“Stop telling her stuff like that,” Mama snapped. “Girl is shy as she is.”
Nana waved her off like she was a nasty old fly, and the two forgot all about pulling weeds in favour of an argument. I was too nervous to defend Nana, to tell Mama she wasn’t saying anything nasty about my looks.
Nana was talking about the lady in the water, the one with many faces.
But it’s hard to keep listening to people when they go and die on you. I forgot pretty quickly what colour Nana’s eyes were, forgot what flowers she smelled like when I hugged her goodbye. Nana was a stranger from my past, her warning stranger and more distant still.
So, the next time the lady in the garden pond spoke to me, I went and listened.
It was hemmed in with bog weeds, so it took me a bit to push back all the wildflowers to get to the water. When I did, frogs no bigger than my thumb emerged and jumped away in droves. I knelt against damp soil and leaned over.
Doe eyes blinked at me, and a wide smile blossomed over the surface of the water like a blood-beading cut. When I pressed my fingers against my mouth, the movements weren’t mimicked. Wind brushed through the garden, water rippled, and the lady’s face changed. Horizontal pupils, set within an umber eye, peered at me. Behind her, what seemed to be a second face looked longingly for whatever lay beneath the pond.
“An ever-gnawing ache in your chest, isn’t there?” the lady said. A pond skater cut across her face and left a scar. “What can I do to soothe it?”
I trembled but held my gaze. Nana Eddie’s words flickered back to me like dying embers, tepid and hollow. Without her stern voice in the air, directly in my ears, my curiosity grew wayward. I watched the face within the pond, churn-changing like a roiling current.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I whispered, frightened that Mama might hear me from the house and come out to scold me. Clouds gathered overhead, and for a moment, the woman grimaced. Her words came with an air of disappointment.
“Nana knew,” she said. “I whispered things to her as she tended the garden, to keep her company. Some of it she rather liked. Some of it kept her full and fat. But then all of a sudden, she stopped listening.”
“Nana Eddie said you told her awful things,” I explained. “That I shouldn’t even look at you, never mind listen.”
A minnow darted across the pond, pain flashing over the woman’s many faces like bolts of lightning. “Not everything can be lovely,” she said. “Nana wanted to know the truth, and the truth is what I gave her. Nana wanted to know, until she didn’t.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“Everything.”
All at once it came.
Water rushed towards me, her pale arm slicing through the air. The grip on my jaw felt as tight as a bear trap. As she wrenched me forward, tendons in my neck snapped and popped. I tried to call for Mama, for anyone, but the water rushed through my mouth, down my nose. I opened my eyes to green murk, and when it cleared, when at last I could see, there was the lady with a thousand faces, and we were falling—
• • •
down.
Jagged rocks bit at my knees. Algae and iron coloured each breath. The pond was behind me, its surface a boiling current, steam rising towards an endless, crimson sky. My neck screamed in agony as I turned, gazing out towards a ruptured horizon. A black hole spewed across the land, a sun with only shadow.
In my ear, a voice, so much like Nana’s, whispered, “Climb, and know everything.”
The black sun constricted, relaxed, flexed as though a gasping throat, and its words scorched me. My chest tightened, pulse thundering in my ears along with the whisper. She was everywhere. In the bloodied sky and dripping moons. In distant mountains, the skeletal jaws of ravenous giants. She was the molars, the fangs, the incisors. She was the creature crushed long before between her teeth.
The gorge of flesh and howl of death as one.
“Climb,” she said. “Climb!”
Then: silence.
In the settle, in the pause of crimson gloom, two pale eyes cut through the sky. The planes moved, the sky cracked, and in the spaces left behind, a monstrous back straightened. Her form eclipsed all. I watched, could only watch, as a thousand bodies scrambled up stalagmite legs, and a thousand more careened down towards nothing, nowhere.
As my gaze wandered up, flames rocketed through my head, cartilage cracked from behind my eyes. A thousand thoughts rushed through me, into me, and my own mind split in two. One content in the inert embrace of Nana, mind as clear as a stream. The other: wandering, wondering, and so very hungry.
In the second before I chose which would be my fate, a hand clamped down on the back of my neck, and pulled—
• • •
up.
Mama dragged me away from the pond. Rust bled through the murky water. Her hands followed, warm and gentle across my face, yet her voice was clipped and furious. I stared, dumbstruck, into her features. With water still running into my eyes, her face melded into foreign shapes, a mess of colours. I couldn’t speak. Could hardly think. My stomach jolted as though falling through the air.
“Calm,” Mama said. “Calm!”
I reached towards her face, fingers ghosting over the wrinkles around her eyes, and dug my fingers into the sockets.
Desperately trying to climb.
Author’s Note & Bio
The World provoked many images from me, but the core idea which really stuck was this nagging thought that to truly be complete, everything must be absorbed. How on earth could you return to normality after realising that true fulfilment, to know everything, requires you to be consumed?
Demi-Louise Blackburn is a dark fiction author from a small, tired town in West Yorkshire, England. Some of her morose tales have found homes with Kandisha Press, All Worlds Wayfarer, Ghost Orchid Press, and The Future Dead Collective.
You may spot the shadow of Demi around the riverbanks of her home, at a festival during summer, or holed away painting during the cooler months. But mostly, you’ll find her skulking online, collecting questionable and potentially haunted knick knacks for her office, which is lovingly dubbed ‘The Smile Room.’
Find her at demi-louise.com.
“The Fall” copyright © 2024 by Demi-Louise Blackburn
