Cut the Cord

The Reaper did not speak. He did not even move, for what need did he have to chase anyone? Everyone comes to him eventually. Men, women and gods all are consumed in his ever waiting black. Clive, sighing deeply, turned to look Death in the face. 

In the form he took for Clive, Death stood around seven feet tall. The hood of his monk's cowl falling to just above the bridge of the nose, had there been a nose to speak of. Instead, there was simply a hole, a cavernous nothing, like death itself, that hung like a cave above the fixed death's head smile. The unmoving, unflappable grin of the skull, never to be bargained with, never to be moved.

 In one hand, from which straggled tendrils of long rotted flesh hung like threads, the figure held a huge scythe. The blade for which, was so keen that the air moving around it seemed to divide and slice as it touched. A blade kept sharp for the reaping of souls. The severing of the cord from the mortal plain. 

As he stared into the inevitable, the gaping abyss represented by the figure standing before him. Clive thought back to the images he had seen of 'Death' to the medieval woodcuts, their finer details blurred with the bleeding of the ink. Or the finely etched engravings of Albrecht Duhrer and Goya, with Death, the hooded skeleton or rotting ancient cadaver. 

He wondered if all of those hours poring over medieval manuscripts had formed this image for him. Whether to others, Death appeared in a different shape or in no shape at all. The thought flashed by like a furtive  glimpse one sometimes catches of a rat, so fast and elusive that you are left to doubt if it was the thing itself, or merely its shadow that you saw streak by.  Now though, there was no time for contemplation. Now was the time for terror. 

Clive knew of the phenomena of 'shadow figures'. Of people in hospitals who reported seeing shadowy figures waiting for them in the corners of the room. And how research had linked the appearance of these figures to hallucinations caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain. For a second, he wondered if this might be the case. That perhaps he had suffered some attack or injury that was causing him to hallucinate, to see this figure as clear as day that wasn't really there. After a moment however, he disregarded this notion. There had been no injury, no attack or problem in the workings of his mind and this was no shadowy figure or indistinct outline.