All the Fiends of Hell

by Adam L.G. Nevill

The moon, bigger than it should ever be. Red and veined with black crusts.

Outside his window, the world had been red. A crowd was falling upwards. So many.

Reception in the village was poor but the screen display continued to inform him that there was no signal. There was a red triangle where there should be a white one. Everything stored inside his phone was now a part of history. His phone merely contained the past. The thought frightened him.

What had been a watery rose colour, mere days before, now resembled the murky underside of a wet bandage – a dressing peeled from a wound inflicted upon the earth. A massing claret and black scab seemed likely to form. East and west, a deeper carmine, veined black, extended in great gangrenous horns as if to encircle the Midlands and menace the Southwest. Inexorably, the discolouration was spreading south. Gradually erased by the vast crimson crescent, the low ceiling of dull cloud, and the curious magnesium light that filtered through it, had prevented even the smallest vestige of a clear or blue sky from appearing.

But he had no answers. There was no understanding this. Attempts to do so baffled him. Panic kept stealing the breath from his lungs.

Black as coal, the lump encroached from the darkness encasing the earth. A vast satellite outside of the atmosphere, the true dimensions impressive enough for recognition as a celestial body.

He clutched his wounded arm, cradled it, knowing he was incapable of containing his fear for much longer. A desperate unborn scream kicked the back of his throat.

Behind their backs, the improperly closed curtain offered a glimpse of a reddish form slinking into the space they’d just vacated. Unseen appendages propelled it, crablike, across the tiles and over obstacles.

Resembling sacrifices before the iconography of a temple, the hospital’s survivors now hung from a curious gibbet, newly erected beneath the crimson sky.

No human geometry, design, or recognisable architecture could he discern from these intricate gallows upon which the vanquished had been threaded. And twisted. And broken into the disorder of manmade materials to convey an awful aesthetic.

Burning world. Empty world. They had to leave it, somehow.

No one knew anything. There was absolutely no certainty left in the world. False prophets and the demented led the foolish.

What fell in platelets from the sooty sky was ash. A myriad flakes, ranging from specks to clumps, drifting down through a granular haze that suggested black light. Soon after the ash fell, rain followed. Dirty rain that was too warm and swilled dark rivulets across the salt-bleached pavement.

He had no language, no means of communicating to the child in his care, that this was the result of a crematorium that had been turned upside down. What was raining upon them was the funeral of animal life.