The Wicked Garden, continued

Anita-Marie Mosceco wrote this part of this story, her challenge was to finish it:

There is a woman who is voiceless from wailing and wasted from weeping and Death visits her from Faraway at Midnight. Death finds her in her Garden, her long dead garden tending to weeds and thorns and sticker bushes and poisonous plants and as she harvests and picks and adds each deadly plant to her basket woven from human hair.

Death shudders and hides in the Shadows and is grateful the Woman can’t see him. All the same she knows Death is there and when she senses it, she reaches into her basket and lifts one of the plants to her lips and pushes it into her mouth. She chews and swallows and screeches into the darkness, “Where are you? Why aren’t these working”

My ending, if indeed it is an ending, was originally posted to the Pythian Games:

Continuing the story started by Anita Marie Moscoso…

 

Death steps further back into the Shadow, uncertain about the wisdom of seeking and taking a soul that feels far bleaker than his own. He puzzles over what, or who this woman is, how her life became a wasteland, so devoid of everything that she lacks even fear of him.

 

He stands back in the shadows, lost in thought, recalling centuries of stalking lands stricken by famine, beset by war and waste, dry dustbowls stripped of life, fostering and nurturing disease and pestilence, creating orphans and widows, collecting those who despaired and fell. Death had been in this world forever, and had never come across any one who’d actually mocked and defied him. It felt strange, uncomfortable as though she were stalking him, dragging him down with the bleakness of her soul.

 

Death looked up again, focussed on the spot where the woman had been standing; she was no longer in front of him. The space she’d occupied empty. He suddenly senses rather than hears her; a chill passes through him, he feels a slight pressure against his side, and feels the smell and taste of bitter herbs smothering him.

 

His frame shudders as he feels her bleak despair settle in his core, as he plunges into the deepest darkness beyond this world and gives himself up to sensations he has dispensed so many times before. Death hears the voiceless sounds, words in his head:

 

I have watched you, cheated you and overcome you, I am Nemesis