The Dark Symphony

whining, throbbing, countless melodies… in
seinen armen das Kind war todt
…
    Before them, the sky was black from horizon to horizon, stung with faint brown stars. To the right were the chocolate mountains. To the left, an ocher plain…
    Silence seemed to radiate from the land.
    They walked forward, but as they walked, they seemed to flow with the land. The black grass grew through their feet and tangled in them, withered when it could not hold them. Ahead stood the manbat Guil had thrown through the pillar.
    "There's something wrong," Tisha said. "Do you feel it?"
    "Yes," he said. "If this is Death, where is everyone? There should be others. Many others. We're not the first to die."
    "Guil!" she said.
    "What is it?"
    "The stars! Look at them! They form Rosie's face."
    And he saw that it was so. But when they tried to speak to the hallucination, it did not seem to know they existed. They could not reach out to Rosie.
    Next, Guil saw that the moon was Redbat with his wings folded into a circle. He had no fangs now, and neither were his hands marked with claws.
    They called out to him, but he did not respond—as if he did not know they were present.
    They came to an obsidian tree, onyx leaves glistening with the strange moon's light. When Guil reached to touch it, his hand moved through it and felt nothing.
    "I'm afraid," Tisha said. "It isn't working out right. It is as if this isn't real, like a dream."
    "Hallucinations," Guil said, referring to Rosie's face in the stars and the form of Redbat in the moon.
    Then, before any more could be said, the sound rifle Guil had left propped in the statue of Chopin finally succeeded in negating the molecular patterns of the column. The walls of this world seemed to close in upon them. Their bodies erupted into millions of fireflies, into a bright shower of white dust that glowed and glimmered. Each of them felt energy leaving his body—and a strange new vibrant force seeping in.
    The bright dust particles settled, congealed, and became their bodies again.
    "What happened?" Tisha asked.
    "Simple," a voice said beside them.
    They turned and found Rosie, grinning.
    When they looked to the stars, his face was no longer there. And Redbat was no longer the moon.
    "You were in the land of Death," Rosie explained. "But you were not dead. You had not died to get here. That makes you an anachronism. You could not really be a part of Death until you had shucked your life energies adapted to the world outside the pillar. When the pillar collapsed, you were killed. Thus the hallucinations dissolved, and you found the reality. Death is the next plane of existence, and now you are adjusted to it."
    Guil took her arm in his.
    He saw other people now, each engaged in other tasks.
    "The nearest city is this way," Rosie said.
    They followed him toward the rise as the night moved rapidly toward day in this new world. The stars came down, marking the sky with umbrageous streaks that punctuated the constant rhythm of the booming surf that edged some vast, uncharted sea beyond…

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