No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare.
Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood.
There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s carrying us proves to be less of a modern machine and more of a bucket in a well. Worse, what I thought were ropes leading to an unseen pulley overhead is looking more and more like intestines spilling out of the elevator operator’s punctured stomach!
“Sub-level 2,” shouts the poor tortured man, who has his back turned and his head covered with a bell-boy hat. “Souls driven over the edge by passion. Pervs, pedos, rapists, white slavers and cyber-stalkers.”
The voice is drugged lethargy mixed with the most potent dose of despair. The doors open and a howling gale blows inside as though from a tempest battering a ship and whisks several individuals away. I glimpse an unimaginable number of people outside being tossed back and forth like rag dolls in the air, their feet never touching the ground. Then, thankfully, the doors close.
Without batting an eye, the elevator operator continues: “Sub-level 3: The gluttons and those who gorged themselves while others starved. Junkies and escapists…”
The elevator bell dings. This time the doors let in an icy gust packed with fly-infested black snow and rock-size hail. It plucks the bulkier of my companions off the walls like they were weightless then dumps them in what I believe to be fields of rotting corpses stretching endlessly. The stench is enough to make a grown man’s stomach turn but, miraculously, the automatic doors shut and cut it all off.
I’m painfully confirming that Hell is indeed patterned after Greek mythology, and Dante. It’s divided into nine concentric circles, nine underground layers, the next more vicious than the one above it and continuing down to the burning core of the planet itself, where judgment is meted out on the devil himself, Lucifer. Every sinner receives punishment equal to the chief sin they have committed, in an ever grislier dose of poetic justice.
I know I’m going to faint any second so as soon as this thought occurs to me, tiny pieces of wire creep delicately under my eyelids to keep them from closing. Insistent electric charges also zap my vision right back into focus as though to remind me not to look away or I’d miss the show.
“Sub-level 4. Money-hoarders, squanderers and corrupt politicians. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where gentlemanly Death shall come like a thief in the night and all that.”
In addition to the chains, leather collars with long spikes materialize out of thin air and snap like cobras at a great many necks. Then all the chosen ones are yanked out of the elevator by their leashes. They are flung against gigantic, cartoony bags filled to bursting and alight with gold coins. Brief, steam-like hisses accompany the repeated sound of nail guns punching, as the inverted collar spikes sink into human necks, drawing blood and forcing the new slaves to start pushing the huge money bags along.
“Sub-level 5: Child-killers, mass murderers and random shooters. Those who bullied the weak. Also the slothful and the morose. If you look to your right, you might catch glimpse of the abominable River Styx.”
I smell something like sewer gas and before anyone can scream “God have mercy,” a tidal wave of some nasty liquid has engulfed the elevator. I savor a few precious seconds of peace thinking how like a blessing it would be to finally die in the intangible hands of the element I first chose to be the end of me. Now already on our third encounter…
I should’ve known better than to hope. The water subsides as rapidly as it has come and I notice more of us have gone missing. I take big, hungry gulps of air while the elevator operator carries on as usual, ridiculously unfazed with just the daintiest trace of algae on his cap. My eyes follow the swampy river as it ebbs back to its original course. On the reddened banks, a sea of people are locked in a perpetual melee because everyone rises back up like rabid berserkers despite their mortal injuries.
“Sub-level 6: Split-level practitioners, the hypocrites and the intolerant…”
The elevator dings and right away my bladder empties again, releasing a warm, even flow inside the legs of my wetsuit. A giant hand made entirely of roaring flames squeezes in and pinches people between its thumb and forefinger, instantly roasting them and singeing everyone else around. The obscene smell of burning human flesh fills the elevator, then the spirits are lifted away and locked in flaming coffins.
I’m terrified out of my wits. The next will be my stop, the Seventh Circle, where all suicides are punished. And I can’t for the life of me remember…
Another hand, thankfully of normal size, pokes in at the last moment and catches the closing doors. I become fixated on the fact that this hand is suggestively human and wearing a ring on every finger; rings of all gothic themes, particularly a skull, scorpion, talon, jester’s cap and cat’s eye.
When the elevator doors reopen, another character steps in wearing a black ankle-length overcoat and a wide-brimmed leather hat that completely hides the face except for a long predatory beak. I instantly recognize the character from my persistent nightmare and chills race each other up and down my spine.
For a reason unknown even to my enhanced psychic abilities, this newcomer is carrying a guitar case. His identity, however, is readily clear to me. He’s the muse of heavy metal. Not Satan, contrary to popular belief. Even the Devil comes and goes whereas the one in front of me is the most constant deity and the most elemental plague of humanity: King Death.
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“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike Kharon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will paralyze you right where you stand. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave: gravelly and frosty,giving the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal underworld. The elevator operator makes the big mistake of doubting what he has just heard and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a smooth, round mass of flesh. The face is as heartrendingly crude as a stickman’s face traced in dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death, they bulge. No sight could be more apt for the expression “eye-popping
Sol’s Umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks vaguely familiar because of the band posters on the walls. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless acoustic guitar and sobbing piteously. Back on Sub-level 5, I must’ve drunk some of the River Lethe’s water mixed in with the slime of the River Styx because it still takes a moment for me to put two and two together and realize that Sol’s grieving. For me. All at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the speed and force of a hundred grams of ecstasy, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence: {In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sol that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The woman lying in the hospital bed is Jan but at the same time not her. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell. She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pal
I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or cheated when I find under the wide-brimmed hat, the mother of all anticlimaxes: a beak doctor’s mask, the kind that medieval doctors wore during the Black Plague in Europe and what modern-day revelers sport at the Venetian Carnival. Still, I can divine the reason behind this diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspires and to behold it in all its extradimensional glory is to spontaneously fry your brain. In one fluid, memorized motion, Septimus whirls his overcoat off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of monitors to assume the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal; tragically its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, making it otherwise perfect as a peg. Septimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit before stiffening ramrod straight like a
“As a child, Oriana was no stranger to death,” Septimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere {inside} the father’s bedroom. The words sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself as a separate phenomenon isn’t lost on me. I catch the faint smell of his cigarette like the fading echo of an echo. “There had been far too many partings around her, as always there are around each and every fleshie. First, there was Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother’s traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even more difficult not understanding what was going on and not being able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of
“Does she remember…” I blurt out. Completely spellbound by the story, I forget who I’m speaking to; at the same time there’s a kind of millisecond delay because of the time-travelesque illusion and it feels like I’m being slammed back into Death’s office. “… the promise that she made?” “What do you think? Humans are Janus-faced creatures. At times of need they shall call upon the names of all the saints and then take back what they promised as soon as they are out of harm’s way. Even more so with Death. Naturally no one remembers me. I am the Ever Uninvited Guest; the one thing no mortal thinks of unless it is absolutely certain and can no longer be postponed. Never mind that I am the most constant friend you have, second only to your shadow.” Septimus puts out his cigarette in the most unlikely ash tray. Another skeletal arm, this one sort of elongated, bursts upward out of the floor and opens its bone fingers like petals. The osseous ash tray then slips away in the same manner it h
“Spinstra instructed me that, because it is a mortal condition then it should be treated following the ways of mortals. And so I have labored to understand a little of your world – the world of livestock and insects, can you imagine? Like a monk I pored over tome after tome in huge mausoleums of human vanity – {libraries}, I believe they were called – until I came upon the most promising solution to my troubles.” An unmistakably human sigh. “Instead of keeping this feeling secret, I must confess it to the very source of it. Only then will I be released and cured of this insanity.” At first, nothing makes sense. Then it comes to me with the flung weight of a bullet train. “What are you saying? You want to... propose to Rina?” “Yes. This you will help me do,” he speaks matter-of-factly. “Since the only way to conquer love is to yield to it, I shall allow myself to be swallowed by it whole. Is that not what your philosophers say? I have to face my fear of rejection and walk through
Why is this happening to me? I know now that there is life after death and I’ve accepted, at least to some extent, that I’m in Hell for being sinful and taking my own life. But of all the seven billion people in the world, or the hundreds of billion who have died from the beginning of time till now, why do I have to be Death’s plaything? I feel as miniscule as a dustmote when I ponder these statistics. I guess I’m still in shock. I keep yo-yoing from feeling resigned to my new home – a vast, extremely cruel penal colony where humankind is judged and punished like clockwork – to harboring the false hope of somehow escaping my tormentors and getting back to the world of the living. And my body! It takes a great deal of positivity to hold back despair at the sight and feel of my fangs, claws, thorny fur and ball-shaped tail. I sleep fitfully, tormented by vivid, psychotic nightmares that I know are but shadows of the real horrors that will greet me once I succumb to consciousness. Oh m
The Lachesis monitors have a mind of their own. If I’m not careful, they’ll steal, twist and corrupt my own memories. As Septimus demonstrated, the monitors zoom in on any person anywhere in the world, on ground level and at real time, but they can also show scenes from both the past and the future, proving conclusively that human lives are all predestined. {Hundreds of billions of people have walked this earth since the dawn of time. At present alone there are eight billion people on the planet. And inside the human DNA, billions of gene pairs construct themselves to create two eyes, a nose, a heart, two legs...} {I am unique. I am not insignificant. There’s a genetic symphony inside me, a clockwork that sets off its designs at such precise timing, including the very senescence of cells. I am a book capable of writing its own stories. I have the capacity to love and I, too, shall be loved. There is a corner in this universe where I am wanted, where I am needed, where I belong, and