Some of us tried putting our hands over our ears, to keep the voices out, but it didn’t work. We weren’t hearing them with our ears.

We left the voices behind, their cheated screams receding into the distance, and after that there was only silence, and the descent, and the feeling of something really bad drawing slowly closer. At the end, there was no sensation of stopping. The elevator doors just slid open, without cause or warning, and the standard colourless light spilled out onto a terrible darkling plain. None of us moved. It didn’t feel safe. What we could see of the world outside was dark and dismal, the only light a deep dull purple, like a bruise. I moved reluctantly forward, stepping out of the elevator, and one by one the others followed me. A terrible, grinding oppression fell across me the moment I left the comfortingly normal light of the elevator, as though I was suddenly carrying all the troubles of the world on my shoulders. There was no sound anywhere, as such, but something like an unending roll of thunder growled in the air, like a long bass note you could only hear with your soul, like a threatened storm you somehow knew had been on its way forever.

We all stood together, keeping close just for the comfort of living company in the face of this dead or dying world. We didn’t belong in a place like this, and we all knew it. And then the elevator doors slid shut, cutting off the bright, healthy light, and we all spun around just in time to see the elevator disappearing down into the cracked stone ground; leaving us alone in the awful place it had brought us to. A purple stained plain that seemed to stretch away forever in whatever direction I looked.

It felt . . . like the end of the world. A darkling plain under an endless night. Up above, a bloodred moon hung low in the sky, where one by one the stars were going out. Already there were great dark gaps in the unfamiliar constellations. The endless plain was bare stone, marked here and there with huge craters, long jagged cracks, and deep crevices. Like the bottom of the ocean, after all the seas have boiled away. There was a crevice nearby, a long jagged line with crumbling edges. I moved over to it and stared down into the gap. It seemed to just fall away forever. I made some kind of sound, and Molly was quickly there to take my arm and pull me back from the edge. As though the sound of my voice had triggered something, strange twisting vegetation, rough creepers with huge dark leaves covered with pulsing red veins, curled slowly up out of the crevice. Molly and I backed away, and the twitching plants tried to follow us, but already they were rotting and falling apart. Alive and dying at the same time, as though they hadn’t developed enough to hold a form properly.