Tonight, the image was particularly vivid. It was her grandmother, sweet, frail Nana Rose, whose casket now lay under the oppressive floral arrangements. Ellen clutched her husband David's hand, her knuckles white. "Are you alright?" he murmured, mistaking her pallor for sorrow.
"Fine," she lied, her gaze fixed on the mahogany box. Nana Rose, don't fall. Please, don't fall.
But the truth was, Ellen was not fine. For the past week, since Nana Rose's diagnosis, the nightmares had begun. Not of Nana dying, but of Ellen falling. She would wake in a cold sweat, her own throat raw from silent screams, the sensation of endless descent lingering in her stomach.
The service ended. The mourners dispersed, leaving Ellen and David to walk home in the oppressive silence of a moonless night. As they neared their house, a sudden, blinding light erupted from the sky. A meteor? A flare? Ellen barely registered it before a deafening CRACK split the air. The ground beneath their feet buckled violently. David cried out, losing his footing. Ellen stumbled, her vision blurring, and then the world tipped.
It wasn't an earthquake. It was a sensation far more personal, far more terrifying. She wasn't falling with the earth; she was falling from it.
The familiar horror of her childhood vision materialized around her. The air turned frigid, then burned with an impossible cold. Stars, once distant points of light, became streaks of terror above her, rapidly receding. Below, an inky blackness yawned, bottomless and hungry.
"David!" she shrieked, but her voice was instantly torn from her, twisted into a thin, reedy wail.
She was falling backward. Her hair whipped around her face, stinging her eyes. Her arms flailed uselessly, grasping at the non-existent air. The ground, the city, her life—all vanished in an instant, replaced by an infinite, screaming vacuum.
This wasn't death as an end; it was death as a beginning. The beginning of an eternal, agonizing plummet.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the swirling black, the encroaching emptiness. But the sensation was undeniable: the sickening lurch in her gut, the pressure building in her ears, the impossible speed. And then, the sound began. Not her own scream, but the scream. The collective, horrifying wail of every soul that had ever tumbled into this dreadful chasm. It echoed around her, a chorus of pure, unadulterated fear, each note a sharpened dagger to her sanity.
She opened her eyes, desperate for anything to latch onto, any fixed point in the maddening descent. And then she saw them.
They weren't stars.
They were faces. Millions upon millions of them, suspended in the blackness, each one locked in a rictus of terror, their mouths wide, silently screaming. They were souls, caught in an eternal freefall, endlessly watching each new arrival. And among them, she saw Nana Rose, her usually gentle face contorted into an expression of abject horror, her eyes wide, glistening with unshed tears that would never fall in this airless void.
"Nana!" Ellen tried to shout, but her voice was already part of the chorus, absorbed by the endless, terrifying symphony.
She knew then. This was it. This was the final destination. Not heaven, not hell, but the unending fall. An eternity of terror, plummeting backward into a void filled with the silent, screaming faces of the dead. She would join them, another terrified observer, another eternal faller. Her own scream was now indistinguishable from the others, a single thread woven into the tapestry of infinite dread.
As she plunged deeper, she could feel a cold, insidious presence coiling around her—the void itself, a conscious, consuming hunger. It didn't want to kill her; it wanted to feel her fall. It fed on the terror, on the endless, backward plunge.
And then, she saw David.
He was above her, much higher up, just a tiny, flailing speck against the receding stars. He was falling too. But he wasn't falling backward like her. He was falling forward. His face was a mask of confusion, then dawning realization, but no terror. His body angled downwards, as if diving, not tumbling. He looked almost serene, as if accepting his fate.
A fresh wave of horror, sharper than anything before, ripped through Ellen. They were dying differently. She was suffering the eternal terror she had always imagined, while he… he was simply falling. Was it because she had imagined it so vividly, so obsessively? Had her own fear created this particular hell for herself, while those who hadn't imagined it were spared this specific torment?
The faces of the eternally screaming souls around her seemed to mock her, their silent mouths echoing the question. Had her childhood fear, so potent and persistent, manifested her ultimate doom?
As David's figure grew smaller, vanishing into the relative peace of his own forward descent, Ellen felt the void's embrace tighten. Her scream was no longer a struggle against the fall, but an acceptance of its unending nature. She was a permanent resident of the backward-falling void, one more face in the infinite gallery of terror.
And she would fall. Forever.
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