Excerpt from Jackalopes

The following passage from my story Jackalopes takes place after the heroine, Jane, has entered the city of memories in order to find out just how she died and got into the underworld...
It has not yet been edited. As such, there may be spelling/grammar and continuity mistakes. Enjoy!

Jane was taken back many years, thousands of years to moments just before her death. Her eyes closed just before seeing the scene, a park in a busy city. Behind her was some sort of elevated look-out platform, no stairs in sight. From the other side her manager came running, panicked as usual. This was her last living memory...

It took Jane a good while to realize that she was indeed sentient again. For a the last hour she had simply listened to the noise coming from above her, but now she realized that the noise was speech and that they were talking about her.

“And now, we open up the path to the underground road…” somebody said.

“May her path be easy and may it lead to Tymor!”

The next thing Jane realized was that she could not move. She was locked in the darkness and could not move a finger. She tried to scream for help, but the blackness engulfing her was pushing against every fiber of her body. Just as it felt like she was suffocating and drifting away into nothingness, Jane felt the ground rumble and give away. She was swirling down a vortex of rushing sounds, tossed like a ragdoll in the fierce wind. Suddenly, all was still and Jane found herself lying down on something soft and velvety.

Jane was sleeping in darkness for many years. The air around her was empty but cold and refreshing, and she did not have to think or feel about anything in particular. The only thing that bothered her was some sort of insistent buzzing that kept appearing more and more frequently. Finally Jane felt that she had to wake up and get rid of that stupid bug or whatever it was that kept bothering her.

Jane fumbled in the darkness and found a wooden door. Opening it Jane found herself standing in a long dark hallway which curved into a sidewalk at an impossible angle. The corridor was mostly empty, but Jane could not help noticing rusty beams and chains smeared with dried blood. These things were always located near some sort of window, but they were bolted down and impossible to open. How had Jane arrived at this strange place!? No matter how hard she thought about it, she could not remember anything except practicing for the high-jump contest and then walking in the nearby park…

“Hello, is there anybody there!?” she called out.

“I was wondering...if anybody...could, maybe”

Jane was not only becoming afraid, but also close to panicking. There was no natural explanation for her to be here or indeed, for the corridor to bend that way. Jane tried to go back to where she had come from, but the corridor ended with a brick wall. The wooden door she had previously simply lead into some kind of dark labyrinth with dark an terrifying shadows. They seemed to be moving and whatever was inside them was chanting ominously with a tiny oppressive voice.

On the wall was painted a giant mask an unnaturally wide grin, which Jane was afraid to get close to. When the mask began to chuckle, Jane turned and ran the other way. Near the corner where the corridor began to curve Jane saw several weird things.

This was her memories of being dead...

First and foremost, there was a crack in the ceiling, exposing the outside of the corridor. Jane tried to get a good look, but all she could she was a vast expense of white, which blinded her in the dark corridor in which she was trapped. There was also a mirror closed to the crack, but a red piece of cloth was obscuring Jane´s face. Just outside the crack was a great red eye, under which rested a single white tooth. Recoiling in fear when Jane realized what she saw, Jane took some time to understand what this being was telling her.

“Are you going to linger here forever?” it said to her.

The voice was harsh and shrieking, without pity or mercy. Jane trembled, her heart beating faster and faster and filling up to the brim with a great dread, but finally managed to ask where she was.

“This is nowhere, quite simply.” the being said.

“And I am no one, and nothing.”

“No one and nothing...” Jane repeated for lack of anything better to do.

“No one and nothing...”

Jane did not understand. However, the cloth fell of the mirror and Jane immediately saw why the corridor had appeared so crooked to her. Her neck was bent to the side, hanging limply of the side of her head.

This totally destroyed Jane, who broke down on the ground and began to cry fiercely.

All the while, the being on the other side of tried to gnaw through the crack with its single tooth. Jane got on her feet and ran as the wall crumbled and the corridor was filled with light. There were nowhere to run, and the tooth gnawed at her neck…

Jane awoke with a great pain in her neck. An old woman wearing a cloak was bent over her, cradling her head in her hands. Her head seemed to be on all right now, but it still hurt a lot.

“Stop turning your head; it needs time to heal!” the woman said sternly.

“Thank you” Jane said, relieved at seeing another living (?) person in this strange place.

“Where am I?”

“You are in the borderworld of Xibalba, between the world of the living and the dead. This is the dream cave, where all dreams are made. It is here that shamans and prophets journey to find out more about their deities and their realms...It is here they meet.”

“Does that mean there is a small chance of me becoming alive again?” Jane asked the crouched figure.

“None whatsoever.” the figure said simply.

“And the sooner you accept this, the easier it will be for you. You should not be here; most souls awake in the underworld and not the borderlands...No matter, these things happen and I will get you to your appointment with eternity in a moment...then you can begin your long walk...”

“Wait, you haven´t told me your name!” Jane said, scared of being left alone again.

“I am one of the two who are dreaming” the person who had healed her said.

“Now, let us go...”

The dream cave was full of pictures, some nice but most of them quite eerie. Short dark figures wearing cloaks scuttled in and out of the chambers thirty-two doors, and stairs where leading up and down to places unknown. Nobody reacted to Jane, and she was told to wait. They were carrying boxes and urns labeled with strange symbols. Desperately trying to keep her mind occupied, she looked at the etchings covering the walls, floors and ceilings. Jane particularly remembered a series of picture with a group of rabbits on a field crying, their face being stretched unnaturally by their sorrow. The second picture was destroyed, but the last picture showed the field again, empty. However, the grey picture had been painted with several streaks of blood.

Finally someone came for her. At first Jane thought it was the same woman who had tended to her neck, but this one looked a bit older.

“We will take you to the underworld now” the old woman simply said.

“The fastest road is through the canals of the dream snake, from where all resources needed to produce dreams are formed. Let us go now...”

The elders strongly urged her not to look out and continue on her way, but Jane´s curiosity was piqued. But one of the twin sisters took her to the top of the dream cave and bade her look out of the window, the only window to the outside world found in the cavern of dreams. First Jane thought that the window was simply dirty, but on closer inspection she found it to be images in a storm. They were tumbling and blowing around so hard that the dirty dead ground had several holes and even valleys dug up in it. In the middle of everything a great rainbow dug through the borderworld and the images of dreams. The rainbow had eyes, and a forked tongue...These images, which dreams were made of and perfected in the delirious fumes under the cave of dreams ranged from undermined rowboats to mincemeat nutrition, overkills, innovations, noontide and chemosynthesis. It continued showing all the things that this world and the imagination of humanity contains, such as reproduced benzene all the way expresso, transcendent cousins, synthesis shops, graters, Thor, submarine, scrawls, firehouses, pacifier, honeyed comeback, nightless contradictions, misfeasance expressively swaggering, buffalos and insufferable plasmodium (among other things).

Jane could see some of the elders collect things to make dreams out of, things such as compilations all the way to nonexistentialism, dog cocks, overlanders, nonsatiation, pylons, autonomic approved stockings, water dispensors, giant letters in the shape of the word yeah, ordained declared spectators, cinematographic flies and turgid robots. Somethings appeared from far away, things like excessive Fredericksburgs to frothy whippersnappersl liquids, palaeoclimatologist, reputations, overelegance dripping with bodily fluids and flamboyant dehydrogenated killing syringe scissor-boots.

Some things were disappearing from out of sight, things that were very strange indeed, things such as abnormal caninis made out of diarrhea. There were also things like angelic loincloths, muticous forgetfulness, chivalrously dancing dolls, foregone fire and all sorts of other things like that. Naming them all would be impossible and great waste of time, so let us stop for now and return to the important things Jane saw.

Jane was standing in front of a door that opened to a black void. About a kilometer down there was some sort of greenish-yellow energy field.

“Hit that and you will be in the underworld” one of the sisters said.

“Make sure you do not miss it, because if you do you will fall into the void forever!” the other warned.

“Geez, girls, you make it sound so easy...” Jane muttered, more to herself than anybody else.

“I really don´t have a choice though, have I?”

“No” the two sisters said in unison.

“Now jump!” the younger sister said, and that was that.

Before jumping into the outer darkness and proceeding to the first pylon of Tymor, Jane could not help but notice two other cave entrances going downwards. Asking where these two roads led, as she wanted to put off the jump as long as possible, she was told that they housed two great treasures.

“These two treasures, the shield and armlets are what allow us to shape dreams and protect us from the nightmares The Goon weaves.” the elder sister explained.

“It was made eons ago by a great blacksmith called Prometheus, a man of great foresight and mastery of the metals and the earth.”

Jane was once again very surprised. Her father had many times told her about The Goon, a sort of rabbit boogeyman that would eat naughty rabbit children if they did not behave. Of course, her father had never pretended that it was nothing but a story, but it appeared to be real, which sent shivers down her spine. And above it all Jane could just make out the warped form of the…thing that had chased her in the corridor of darkness just after her death. It was just floating all over the sky, from horizon to horizon.

The big difference was that this time it had its horrible black maw open, sucking the images into it (explaining why the dreams in one era is not the same as in other one). The mouth of the beast had rows and rows of teeth, each one set in a smaller and smaller circle in the mouth of the beast itself. Jane fell back and wished that she had not looked.

“What in the world IS that terrible creature!?” she asked the elder.

“That is Az, the one in-between planes of existences.” The elder responded.

“Only a few can see all of it without losing their minds, and it is a punishment more severe than Hell to be eaten by it. This punishment was forbidden by the gods as the laws were given in the beginning of time itself, as opening portals to it allowed a bit of its essence to slip through. Eventually it would eat everything...”

Jane recognized the word Az. It was an ancient rabbit word meaning void, but this true translation had difficulty conveying the fear and dread inherit in the word. Jane´s grandmother had told her that when the gods were born, space was full of noise and goodness, but now Az had been eating most of it before being sealed away between dimensions. Jane wondered if this was true…Realizing that it was now or never, Jane took a deep breathand jumped into the void. She screamed as loud as she could, but the whistling air drowned it out. The green took her mind and body for its own and she was dead, taken by the underworld... 

Read Jackalopes here:
https://www.wattpad.com/126934443-jackalopes-the-paradise-of-tymor
Read my main blog (including my other projects):
http://atspela.blogspot.com/