The Long Trail and Its End
I have plunged deeper into the pit of nightmares than could be reached in a lifetime dreaming. My whole life I have given to the pursuit of the obscure and the forbidden. I have journeyed into hallowed crypts and neglected lands, scoured ancient tomes and stolen their guarded secrets. I have traded ghastly things for the darkest knowledge and chased many mysteries. I speak in dead tongues and write with dead alphabets. I have gazed darkly into the past and unearthed many of the hideous treasures banished there.
In every deep corner of the Earth I have pursued fear. I chased it into the cobwebbed catacombs of Paris, deep into the wretched crypts of Egypt, across the valleys of ancient dead Sumer, crawling through the boarded-up tunnels of the blackened American cities, dug into the mass graves of war and plague, and kneeling in the de-sanctified churches where ghoulish rites are performed on their sacrilegious altars.
I have documented unspeakable rituals and unutterable curses. I have channeled the tortured souls of the dead and communed with the wrathful gods of the old Earth. I have beheld the deepest black of the universe. Again and again I have flung myself into the labyrinths of terror, searching.
I have done all of this and yet, at the end of it all, on my deathbed, I face the most immutable of all terrors. All that is dark and horrible in the world I have sought, and I find it only here at the end; I dreadfully fear that I may have wasted my life.
[...] A short piece of mine has just been put up on a horror micro-fiction site: Micro Horror. I unearthed it the other night digging through my box of google docs. Check it out: The Long Trail and its End. [...]
Pingback by Short of Horror — August 23, 2010 @ 1:39 pm
This is outstanding. You have skillfully re-contextualized the oldest and most poignant of man’s fears: human mortality. And you have written a story that is perhaps most terrifying only to other horror writers.
Comment by Edward Carney — August 30, 2010 @ 1:34 am
That is a very well written piece. I enjoyed reading it. It reminds me of HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, both massively underrated in terms of evoking mood and atmosphere, something you have done very well.
Comment by Tertius — September 2, 2010 @ 6:14 pm
Clearly written list of things somebody did. But there’s no plot. Just a long list, then he dies. Don’t see the horror in this plotless anecdotal piece. It’s actually a vignette, not a story. Didn’t know this magazine published vignettes.
Comment by Michael A. Kechula — September 6, 2010 @ 8:03 pm
This is completely and utterly wonderful. Its an exquisite amalgam of horror and eventual greater realization. It is not exactly the fear of death, for he wouldn’t have chased all dark things to the blackest corners of the world had he feared death. It is more like realizing, with the greatest possible dismay, that all his life, has gone to a total waste. We quite possibly don’t know or even remotely understand what it is that we should live and strive for until the very last living, breathing, wakeful, conscious, and sentient moment of our human existence. Kudos, Andrew!!!
Comment by Soham Ganguly — October 26, 2010 @ 7:37 am