Emmeline, the girl in the storm

Whitetail

Maybe half an hour later, she was overtaken by a desperate, angry need to shout "Why?" up at the sky and hear it echo back at her emptily. It would either sound pretty cool, conveying the hollowness she felt with perfect feeling, or it would come out as super cheesy, 'your wife and child got killed by the bad guys and now your on your knees in the rain screaming to the gods who no longer hear you' why. With an agreeably angry laugh, Emmeline suspected the later, and held her tongue. Not that anyone would have heard her.

The 'Museum of Fragments' as she had named the land she was walking through, with its post apocalyptic earth remains, had thinned out to nothing but earth and stones again as finally the gates of the otherworld came into sight. It had been a long walk.

Funnily enough, rain had started to fall. A biting, hot, sulphuric rain that felt like stinging nettle in spring on Hampstead Heath, except that it touched Emmeline's skin all over her body, and it lingered before the next droplets came, so it was more like being battered with whole bushels of stinging nettle.

It was making Emmeline pretty angry. Anger is like a match to petrol when there is a full tank of sadness lying beneath it. It had only been about ten minutes of with-holding the wish to scream 'why', but those ten or so minutes felt like enough to bring her to breaking point. She'd curled up into a little ball right in the middle of the road, reeling at the acid rain on her back as she'd pulled the remains of her t shirt over her head to protect her face. There was no one to see her nakedness anyway.

And what were the gates anyway? But towering high rocks before her, ugly and grey and clawing up toward the sky. Emmeline knew there would be gates, thought she hadn't realised she had until that very moment that she had actually considered it. Just as there had been a river.

Just as there had been a Ferryman.

So, based on all this, and based on the limited attention she'd given to Classical History in high school, she cowered from the rain and waited for the Guardian of the Gate.

It was all very well, except that this world was more real than any nightmares that she had dreamt the underworld to be whilst studying The Frogs. Aristophanes hadn't had imagination enough to encompass all this when he wrote his great comedies.

She half wondered if she would meet frog-swans, the antagonistic singing frogs that plagued Dionysus in the opening scenes of the comedy as Charon ferried the god of wine and merry-making across his sacred river.

But Aristophanes had never seen the rivers of the otherworld, and Frog-Swans did not exist, nor had Charon ever rowed a boat across a swamp of rotting bodies, Emmeline suspected.
Emmeline on the other hand, had crawled through a swamp of rotting bodies.

Funny how your mind blanks things out. The first thing she had remembered of the otherworld was the loneliness and the horrible swamp.

She hadn't remembered the bodies until just now.

The limbs.

The soft, pppffffhhluck as beneath the water, her toes would pop through the bloated bellies of the rotting. And the rising bubbles that had followed. Fingers stuck in the gunk of rib cages. The taste of putrefaction on her teeth when the splashes came back at her and she had to breathe, trying not to open her mouth and not to smell, all at the same time.

On the open path, huddled against the stinging rain, Emmeline shivered uncontrollably despite the heat of the burns her body was suffering.
Beneath her the ground was still, but above her, the gates shuddered.

Shielding her eyes against the rain, she barely had time to register what was climbing over the gates before she was falling backward and running for her life.

Worse than acid rain. Worse than belly gas from a rotting corpse. Worse than....being alone.

Eight legs, just as many eyes multiplied across three heads and three sets of fangs the length of goalposts, the creature that was Cerberus came crawling over the gate that barred the way into the otherworld.

A pair of red sparkly shoes and an incantation along the lines of "There's no place like home." would not have gone amiss in that breaking second, as at this point, Emmeline's distant memory of lessons in Greek mythology went awry.

Besides, this wasn't Greek mythology.

This was what had become of Emmeline's life, throwing herself headlong up a cliff face with every last atom in being her hell-bent on survival as a great, black, three headed, white-tailed spider with the body mass of a small dump truck, chased her away from the gates.