Further in

Being dead is rubbish and it doesn't get any easier the second time, let me tell you. The whole cave without walls feeling is very unsettling. Like I said a few months ago, it's easy to underestimate the importance of a good ceiling. Anyway, the cave thing is only one of many tricks that the Stygian authorities lay on to welcome the newly deceased. Flapping along, jammed in this crow's horrible feet, I was able to make out all sorts of unpleasantness going on in the darkness below. There were the moaning shades of the suicides, wailing in the darkness. Then, even worse, the shades of the suicides who were only really going for the whole attempted suicide thing but accidentally overdid it. The people who found themselves, to their horror, not quite able to vomit up the sleeping pills, or whose relatives stopped on the way home to buy a chocolate bar and turned up a little late for their grisly cue. They were depressing.

Further on we hit a little procession of the red tailed devils that are provided for traditional sorts, looking like a gang of smelly trick-or-treaters. Then the mythical creatures, the Sirens and Harpies, Scylla squelching about aimlessly, trying to stop her doggy parts from eating everyone. Soon afterward, we arrived at the fields of the Succubi. For a chap who, as you know, has always been a bit of a soft touch when it comes to demonesses, those legions of pallid beauties are a particular torment - all soft and delicious and evil. I did try to shout up at the crow to see if we could squeeze in an extra stop, but hell-birds never were much for talking. On and on we went, flapping flapping, further into the dark.....

echt echt

Cragh! Splutter.... Hrrgh.

Back at last. Been far away. Far, cold, horrid. The life I'd found - this life and body that I borrowed or stole - was clawed away from me. One morning I woke, and yet was not awake. A rod of iron lay across my chest and pinned me, and my eyes were gummed. my arms tangled with the sheets, that bound themselves wetly around me like sea fronds. A hammering thrust itself brassily amongst the cavities of my skull and brains, and shook everything to chaos.

Then I was lifted and flying through dark air. My eyes cracked and I saw myself gripped in the mottled claws of a monstrous crow, that beat heavily through this space that was cold and vast and yet was not sky. A cave, damp and black, with no walls and no ceiling, and no mouth.

I opened mine to speak, but my tongue filled it like a dead fish and sagged against my throat. My limbs were stiff, now burning with ice that crept up my legs and into the nooks of my arms. For the second time in my life, I was dead.