THE HILLS OF ORE

It was hot in early summer that year.

Temperatures were increasing every day. Global warming they said.

30,40,45 degrees and like the rest of humanity, it was unbearable for the people of the Ore Mountains.

Global meltdown had kicked in and the land was baking. Roads ran. Tarmac doughed. Fields fell and the soil cracked like the dried paint of old masters.

Heat shimmer gave the hills an eerie feel, distant mirages of sleeping giants. Fata Morganas.

The news reported records being broken virtually every day as the suns rays microwaved the unprotected globe. It was all over the world. Climate Change was happening and summer temperatures were spiralling out of control.

Dwar tried his best to keep cool. The shutters of his traditional home were shut tight and inside was more or less in complete darkness if he turned the lights off. He had enough food to last another week and then he would have to drive to town to stock up. Hopefully it would be cooler then.

It was on the day the mercury in his thermometer was nudging towards 50 degrees that Dwar noticed a change for the worse. His phone line was dead and the plastic bungs around his shutters had started to melt. He put on his sun hat and walked gingerly out into the full glare of the burgeoning sun blast. 

The phone cables had melted and the tyres on his truck had wilted like old dogs. It was too hot for basic materials to stay intact outside anymore.

Whilst grabbing the last of the tinned food from the covered rear of his truck he noticed his neighbours across the way. Like him and most of the hamlet they were descendants of the mountain workers who had originally mined the ore buried in the hills long ago and he got on with them well.

He could see Zwer dragging something along the hot gravel. Dwar squinted and to his horror realised that he was dragging his wife's body, leaving a trail of thick red blood behind him.

Dwar ran over to his friends shouting "Zwer, Zwer, what are you doing? What's happened to Kleen?"

Zwer heard Dwar and dropped Kleen's head with a thud. It turned towards the running man and reaching out she gargled his name.

"Dwaaaaaar!"

Zwer stared at Dwar who had reached the drive and raised a huge ore pick he had in his grip. Using both hands be brought it down hard on the side of Kleen's face. It pinned her head to the ground like an insect and her blood sizzled on the roasting surface.

"What in God's name have you done Zwer?" screamed Dwar as he reached the scene of the atrocity. But Zwer was not in the mood for explanations and raised his ore pick once again and stepping over his dead wife he lurched towards his neighbour.

"There is no God Dwar, there are only the demons of the fire. I have seen them!" he growled and Dwar realised that Zwer meant to kill him too. He could see it in his old friend's eyes. They were mad and as lifeless as the ore seams they'd once mined.

Dwar ran from the madman and sprinted home in the remorseless heat but not before seeing villagers fighting in the hamlet's square down the road. He watched in terror as his kinfolk hacked each other to pieces with whatever was to hand: cleavers, spades, forks, scythes, sickles and more ore pick axes.

The village clock was spattered with blood and the gore overflowed from the well's oak bucket. It was a bloodbath and .... they had noticed Dwar!

He turned and ran for his life as the sun-crazed villagers who were left ran after him shrieking and snarling as their weapons glinted in the midday sun, their skin reddening like hide.

Dwar reached his house on the hillside and pressed the button for the steel shutter to release. He hoped that the electrics on the inside hadn't fried. 


"C'mon, c'mon!" he raged through gritted teeth.

They hadn' t failed yet and he heard with immense gratitude the clink of the shutter as it rolled down. The back door was already screened off as were all the windows.

He stood behind the door in his dark living room and listened to the mob smash at the steel roller. He backed away and sat in an armchair in the middle of the floor, the darkness comforting him as his friends went insane.

"Had the whole world gone crazy?"

He shuddered at the thought and Dwar sat all night until there was silence outside. His shuttering had kept them out thank God. 

"What in Christ's name had happened to them. They were like devils!" he mused as he shakily reached for the tap for a glass of water. The tap spluttered but the liquid that came out wasn't water. It was instead a thick red steaming sludge that gave off an unpleasant smell of rotten eggs and decaying flesh.

The frightened man immediately set about making ready to leave. He could not survive much longer in his home if there was no water supply. It would only be a matter of days before he died of thirst. He had plenty of tinned food though and decided on the spot where he must go.

Inside the Ore Mountains.

There was a plentiful water system in there and the ore mine tunnels would keep him cool. 

Dwar filled his wooden handcart with tins, candles, pans and supplies and opened the peep hole in the back door shutter. There was no-one to be seen in the night's blackness and he carefully raised the shutter. 

Stepping into the hot night he checked his thermometer. It read 50 degrees. At night. 

The heat was inescapable outdoors and nobody could survive it for long. With night-time temperatures so high already the following day would be lethal to life for certain and there was no-time to lose getting underground.

Dwar entered the sulphur ore mine as his father had done before him countless times in the days when ore was shipped to the refineries in the valley belching thick smoke into the heavens night and day. That was before the world's ozone layer had evaporated and the sky was left unguarded to the sun's full and inimical force.

He had visited the mine many times with his Father and knew his way. He lit a candle and holding it in a small tin holder he walked cautiously through the tunnels of his youth.

It was a pleasant 20 degrees throughout the initial cuts but Dwar noticed jumps in the mercury as he got near the mouths of deeper shafts. He fancied he had also glimpsed red flames in the shadows but dismissed this as stress-induced reverie.

He strolled on into the far tunnels of the mountain for hours and decided to settle down for what he calculated was another night above ground.

Dwar opened tins of beans and had his last half-loaf in the flickering light of his candle, which cast shadows onto the ancient hewn walls like a strange puppet show. He slept in the dark. In the morning he would have to descend to the lower mines if he was to find water.

He was awoken by a dull sound reverberating through the tunnels. He stood and walked to where he thought it came from.

The source was a deep shaft incised into the rock floor, which fell towards the bowels of the mine where the best ore was to be found. 

As Dwar approached he was now sure that he could see a red glow emanating from the wide mouth of the shaft. The dull sound was now also a deep resonating series of rhythmic clangs as if industry had sprung up once more.

Seeing a steel ladder descending he decided to climb down. He filled his knapsack with some provisions and stepped on the ladder. the clanging was now much louder and crimson glow meant that he could easily see where he was going.

As he got deeper into the shaft the temperature rose and he began to feel anxious and had second thoughts about any further descent. But he took a nip of rum from his hip flask, rallied himself and went lower.

The banging and clunking was now almost unbearable and the red light was clearly the glow of a huge fire as it flickered and quivered around him.

The steel ladder had grown hot too but if he was to find a plentiful water supply he had to get to the mine's wet bowels.

As the steel became intolerable and the noise rose to an ear-splitting cacophony, Dwar was just about to give up and give in to the mad symphony, when his fell-boots touched the hard rock floor.

He quickly released the hot grip of the ladder and noticed the welts forming on his palms. But it was the now ever-more jarring din and hair-singeing heat behind him that made Dwar turn slowly as he felt almost uncontrollable fear grip his entire body.

What he saw chilled him to the very core of his being and seared his mind with a terror no other mortal had ever had to suffer.

Gathered in front of him was a throng of the most hideous things he had ever seen. Thousands of small scarlet horned beings, which covered the floor of a vast cavern aglow with fire.

Some of the beings were running feverishly around another shaft from which burst huge red flames and some of the things were tending heinous machines pulsating with massive moving cogs and gears, the bellows of desolation. Yet others were pounding the mine's yellow ores on a myriad of anvils and casting the powder aloft above the central shaft, where it burnt in the smoke, the fumes of brimstone filling the fetid air.

Dwar knew instinctively that what he was seeing was an army of demons and that this was surely then the ante-chamber to Hell itself and he shuddered violently at this most blasphemous of visions.

But he knew he was right and when his rubber belt melted and his tin water flask fell to the ground the clang by the ladder drew the attention of the nearest smoking devils hammering their anvils.

They turned and stared at him and as they did Dwar felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, singe and burn off as acrid smoke. His rum also steamed away. His clothing caught fire and fell off in flames. His hair flared and was gone and his skin scorched from head to toe, hardened like leather and turned bright red. He screamed.

Before his humanity left him entirely he felt two small horns push through the skin at each side of his reddened head and a strong pointed tail erupt from his rump. When complete he smiled a new smile of sharpened teeth and loped off to join the other lesser imps at the edge.

No longer Dwar, he now waited with his infernal kin for the arrival of the Fallen One, the Twisted Angel, who was ascending the central shaft on a mantle of hideous magma.

The flames were growing across the world. The factory-fingered sky of Men had finally burned away that afternoon and, like the water table Dwar once so desperately sought, Hell-fire would rise and overflow this very day and flood the world with a tide of evil from which there would be no return.

As once-Dwar looked on he knew all this with new-found clarity and threw sulphur into the ring like confetti. His past life corroded away entirely as if portraits in an oven.

He shook with pleasure as a crimson colossus rose slowly from the deep and gripped the rim of the shaft with gargantuan clawed fingers, dragging its vast frame out onto the glowing ground.

The giant stretched out its arms and its face beamed with the rictus smile of death before its amassed servants

The assembled ranks craned their necks as their master rose and when fully erect they fell to their knees.

As the Devil himself stood before them they muttered in unity one single chant of adulation, a sibilant hymn which ricocheted off the walls, along the reddening tunnels and out into a world in flames.

"Satan is risen! Satan is risen!"