Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout Page B

on the back. “Excellent. Lead the way.”
    Romeo did as the prince commanded, and they ventured forward into the blackness.
    …
    One strange thing about the dark void they’d found themselves in, Hamlet mused, was that despite the lack of walls or paths, there seemed to be a general sense of direction to their travels. An urgency propelled them forward in the darkness, even though there weren’t any landmarks to gauge their progress by.
    Stranger still, despite the absence of light, he didn’t have trouble seeing Romeo beside him, limping through the blackness with a determined expression that had really begun to irritate Hamlet.
    At some point, the Italian was going to have to accept that they may have doomed themselves. Or more succinctly put, that Romeo had doomed Hamlet the moment he’d pulled him through the corpseway. Seeing Valhalla had seemed a fine reward for his troubles, but now they would spend their days endlessly wandering in an undefined space. Hamlet found it rather difficult not to feel the pressing need to return to his own purpose, now that the newness of the adventure had worn off.
    “We’re close,” Romeo said, for perhaps the thirtieth time in the last…well, Hamlet had no idea, really. It was, unsurprisingly, difficult to get a sense of time or distance in an utterly blank space.
    “You keep saying that,” he observed dryly. “Do you think saying it again and again will make it true? Or are you merely hoping to say ‘I told you so’ on the unlikely chance we’ll find something out there?”
    “No, look. There’s something out there.” Romeo pointed in front of him.
    It took Hamlet a moment to trust his eyes. After all, when isolated in a completely silent, completely dark environment, the mind tended to play tricks. He knew as much from the ravings of his uncle’s prisoners in the dungeons below Elsinore.
    He knew it from his own psyche as well, the clawing evil that gripped him with terror in the night. In his desperation he often saw clawed hands, flickering visages of the long dead. He’d never been able to separate these false torments from his terrible gift, and that made them all the more terrifying.
    But Romeo’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, unless he’d gone precisely the same shade of mad as Hamlet. There was something out there in the distance, a glittering, pale thing that took shape by unnatural degrees with each step. Though the vision had appeared quite some distance away, like the horizon over the sea, it took them only a few steps to get close enough to comprehend what it was.
    A river sprouted up at their feet, moving swiftly, the caps of the occasional wave rising with red foam as it rocked and raged at its invisible shores. For where there should have been a bank or earthen slope containing the water and directing its flow, all that lay on either side was the ever-present dark.
    The gleaming white they had seen was the form of a woman kneeling beside the stream, wrapped from head to toe in white. A winding shroud, Hamlet realized with horror as he watched her lift the tail of her own garment and dip it into the bloody water.
    She raised her face, and Hamlet recoiled from the sight. Her eyes and nose were covered by strips of her grave shroud, which were befouled by seeping pink. Her skin was pale as watery milk, her mouth a black hole that opened to release a torrent of maggots as she shrieked a chill, despairing cry.
    “What is that?” Romeo reached for his sword hilt, and Hamlet stayed his hand.
    “A washer.” Hamlet licked his lips, his mind placing the taste of grave worms and rot upon his tongue. “They’re portents of death and appear on the eve of a battle.”
    “What does it want with us?” Romeo whispered, as the sobbing wraith bent to scrub her shroud.
    Her lamentations almost inspired pity in Hamlet, if he hadn’t known that she wasn’t a person, but an embodiment of pure regret and sorrow. He’d read about the Washer at The Ford as he’d