[Guess who has been having nightmares so severe they’ve been scaring the goddamn Scarecrow and thus hasn’t slept since his revival.

Guess.

Because he’s tired and cranky and when Crane is cranky he wants to make everyone around him as miserable as possible and he does this by being a freaky motherfucker.

For your enjoyment, a phone call:]

You wake up in a box, pine wood and lined with silk, but you can’t remember how you got there. It’s dark, too dark to see anything around you, but you can hear a rain of dirt above you, feel the heaviness of the Earth swallowing you up. You’ll wear your nails down to the quick and lose your voice from screaming, and you’ll run out of tears long before you run out of air. If they ever bother to dig your coffin up, they’ll find your skeleton twisted in absolute terror.

Thanatophobia. The fear of death.

It’s not that people are afraid of death itself, really. It’s much like the fear of heights; people are more afraid of the fall and subsequent sudden stop at the end than the altitude on its own. With death, what we truly fear is the unknown. Even the most truly devout always has one niggling doubt in the back of their mind, that everything they’ve been taught is a wicked lie. As a man of an advanced age and lacking morality, I’ve often wondered about it myself. What will happen when I, personally, die? Popular opinion seems to be that I’ll go to Hell, and I have been missing my dear old grandmother lately. And yet, that’s only one option, one opinion in a vast sea of speculation. Perhaps reincarnation is the true way. I’d like to come back as a crow, personally. Such majestic creatures.

Or, perhaps, it’s this. Simply, this.

I’m sure Mayfield has been called similar things in the past. Purgatory. Hell. Humans have such an amusing compulsion to apply familiar concepts to foreign ones. Mayfield is a special case, much worse than anything the average mind could comprehend.

But, for lack of a better word, I believe Hell will suffice.