The Things Betwixt...

Long Acre in the Garden House

"Daily Flash Fiction Challenge" 
Winner! 02-11-2025
Word Count - 300 -

It came upon the roaring of an otherworldly evening of storms that a scrawled summons arrived at my door. I peeked through the front window, but only a tap and a shadow hurrying away offered identity to the one who'd penned the letter.

Long Acre in the Garden House,
LC

'Twas a well-known road to me in the bowels of London's haggard and beggarly district of Covent Garden. At the end, there stood an unapologetically plain dosshouse, but upon what inspection I could discern through the haze of rain, it appeared altogether wrong.

Every brick, mortar line, crack, and mote of dust seemed constructed and purposefully placed to beget an unremarkable appearance. 'Twas a building designed to be forgotten. Upon the archway of the entrance, someone had etched into the wood, a most troubling inscription.

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Perhaps it was the words of the downtrodden, for the dosshouses of London were havens of villainy, wickedness and filth. 'Twas that, or I in fact stood before Dante's infernal gate. As troubling as it was, I felt an itching to enter, for anonymous night summons were always the best money.

'Twas not honorable work, but it was favorable to coin-counting and spend thrifting. It oft ended in blood, and sometimes death. Such was the nature of nightwork. Someone had an enemy, and someone could afford a friend. Whoever could cover my cost, earned themselves a gun, and mine ne'er missed.

The door closed behind me and afore me in the darkness, a robed shadow stood before a most grotesque sight. The bodies of those I've killed, were heaped each upon the other.

It stepped toward me.

"And so, your eternity begins," it said as flames consumed the bodies and the room around me. "Thou shalt not kill."

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'Abandon all hope ye who enter here' refers to the inscription over the gates of hell as noted by the character Dante in Dante Alighieri's epic, "The Divine Comedy"