“And when does the Second Phase end?” I asked worriedly.
“It doesn’t,” the Devil said.
It suddenly occurred to me that there were no people here, only the two of us. “But I don’t see anyone,” I said, looking all around me, as much as my aching back would permit.
The Devil looked genuinely forgetful. “I do apologize,” he said. “I sometimes forget that I can see things here that others can’t.”
He added, “But you’ll see them soon enough.”
“I really would rather not.”
The Devil just smiled, and I knew without him having to say it that it did not matter what I would rather do, or not do.
We walked several more long minutes, me barely keeping up and too occupied with the handicap to attempt taking in the surreal environment. Even my mind had fallen victim to old age. But out ahead, I did notice a little makeshift hut and a fire burning under a black kettle where a figure walked back and forth in front of it. I stopped cold, though at first I was not sure why. My chest suddenly filled with alarm, like something had reached inside me through my back and wrenched at my insides. The Devil urged me to follow, and I did against my better judgment.
We stood in the presence of the Hermit—all know him when they meet him just as a man knows Death when his time has come—whose face was wretched and cold. He wore a dusty black robe that dragged the dead earth behind him, the hood pulled over his head leaving his long, coarse hair to fall down from within it and over his shoulders. He grinned up—for he was quite short—at me and the Devil, one eye as blue and majestic as the earthly sky, the other as black and lifeless as the place we dared not speak of.
“Brought one in yourself I see,” said the Hermit, his voice hoarse and frightening. He glanced at me and went back to his kettle, poking at the fire underneath it with a twisted, black stick. Cinders cracked and popped and broke free from the burning wood.
“Not quite, old man.”
I had to sit down; I just had to. Like an old man that had earned his right to fart in public, I was more concerned with my comfort. It only mattered a little that the Hermit was likely the one about to take me to my own personal Hell. But once I made myself comfortable on a rather uncomfortable rock, I came back to my senses.
The devil, however, sat comfortably in a wooden chair, but I hadn't the strength to protest.
“So then this one isn’t ready?” said the Hermit. “Perhaps you’ve come for a visit then. Ah, yes, a visit is acceptable, but you most of all know that there’s a hefty price for my company. You most of all know that I do nothing and I say nothing unless I know it will benefit me. Is this one here your form of trade then?” The Hermit leaned in to examine me and to my shock and disgust, he stuck out his old black tongue and licked me across the face. “Oh! A live one, I see!” The Hermit became animated suddenly with frightening excitement.
“I accept,” the Hermit went on, “Indeed I do. You’ve outdone yourself this time, Lucifer.” He rubbed his hands together greedily. His jagged black teeth pressed so sharply into his bottom lip that the flesh broke apart, though a little bloody pain was not enough to shake his attention.
The Devil crossed one leg over the other. “No,” he said so calmly, “this one is mine, but I have brought you fair enough trade.”
The Hermit gritted his teeth.
“You dare bring me something I would most desire to have and dangle it in front of me, only to tell me that it won’t be mine?”
“Of course I do,” the Devil said, relaxing his back against the chair. “You work for me, remember? So calm yourself, old man, and look at what I’ve brought you.”
The Devil reached up and took off his top hat, turning it upside-down in his hand and then he reached inside. When his hand emerged there was a tiny naked woman dangling from his fingertips by her long, red hair. I did a double take and then, like the Hermit, leaned in closer to get a better look. The tiny woman kicked and screamed, though her voice hardly raised above the sound of a squealing mouse. Her face contorted with fear, and little tears streamed from her eyes.
“And what is her most notable sin?” said the Hermit. “What great Hell shall I conjure for her?”
“Then you’re pleased, I take it?”
The Hermit made a displeased, but accepting movement with his lips and answered, “Hardly, since she’s no different than all the others that come, but I’ll take what I can get, I suppose.”
“Right you will.” The Devil winked at the Hermit, but the Hermit disagreed silently.
“This one,” the Devil began, still holding the woman high in the air, “Was a prostitute.”
“A prostitute? Another prostitute! I have too many of those already, Lucifer. Not very diverse are you?” The Hermit shook his head angrily and turned his back on the Devil.
“So you don’t want her then?” the Devil taunted. “Very well, I’ll have no choice then but to send her back to Creation where she’ll have another chance to redeem herself and you risk never having her for yourself.” He went to put the tiny terrified woman back into his hat.
“Give her to me!” the Hermit grunted, snatching the tiny woman from the Devil’s fingers.
The Devil appeared pleased.
The Hermit shuffled over to a carved tree stump that he appeared to be using as a shelf of sorts, and took down a Mason jar with a golden lid. I noticed that there were several jars placed about and each one contained other tiny naked humans. One man in a jar nearest me aggressively shouldered and head butted the glass. Ping! Ping! Until he fell backward and picked himself up and did it all over again. After tossing the tiny woman inside the empty jar and sealing it, the Hermit thumped against the lid of the jar where the aggressive little man was. “I’ll deal with you soon enough,” he said to the man.
The Hermit turned his attention back to me, looking upon me with bushy brows and matching nose hairs that I thought for sure I saw move in a way not merely stirred by breath. In fact, when my old eyes adjusted at the right angle, I saw that the Hermit’s skin and hair, eyelashes and even his sores seemed to be moving. I looked away quickly and then felt that sense of doom, danger and despair that I had felt when I first saw the Hermit from afar. But I also felt drawn to look, to see what it was that made me so afraid.
There was a voice. “Are you listening?” But I could barely hear it, or understand from whose lips, the Devil or the Hermit, the words came. Something wrapped around my mind, something heavy and diverting and I found myself peering into the Hermit’s face. I saw closer as if looking through a microscope. I heard the voices of the Devil and the Hermit talking, but they were not speaking to me.
There were bodies; living, screaming bodies in the pores of the Hermit’s face. People were reaching out; some were huddled with others, weeping. People made up the Hermit’s hair, from root to tip. His wrinkles, the open sores around his mouth and ears, the warts on his chin and his fingers...every part of him was made of microscopic humans, people damned to suffer.
I looked into the Hermit’s blue eye.
There were scenes of strange horrors and sinister predicaments. A man, wearing a bloodstained loincloth was shackled to a wall by his wrists and ankles, while another figure under a dark hood steadily cut his flesh away and dropped each thin strip into a wooden bowl. A level down near the nostril, a woman was being drowned over and over again in a bathtub full of blood. A figure under a dark hood held her by the back of the throat until her struggling body went still, and then the scene started all over again. To the right, near the Hermit’s ear was a scene with two black-haired men; one forced to impale the other.
“Norman,” said the Devil, waking me from my stupor, “If you don’t choose, he’ll choose them for you and you probably don’t want that.”
I, still a bit out of it, turned slowly.
“The cards, Norman,” the Devil went on, pointing to the ground in front of the Hermit. “Choose three cards and you’ll get to visit someone else’s own private Hell.” T
he Devil said this as if it were a treat.
I looked down. While I had been lost in the strange daze, apparently the Hermit had produced a deck of what reminded me of Tarot cards, and placed them face down on the dirt in front of me, spread out in a half-moon.
“Yes, yes go on, hurry,” the Hermit urged.
“But—”
“Just do it,” said the Devil, “it’s the only way he’ll show you—him and his foolish card games.”
Reluctantly, I reached out my brittle hand and chose my cards, one after the other and very slowly. The Hermit took the first card and placed it alone, face up.
“Ooh, a good one,” the Hermit said, grinning. “For ‘The Sin’ you chose ‘wrath’.” And then he flipped over the second card and placed it after the first. “And for ‘The Crime’ you chose...hmmm, how cliché.” He sucked on a tooth, in thought. “I had hoped for something more...hmmm, something more exciting.”
I looked upon the card in question and although the title seemed to be in Latin, the moving picture of a man wearing rags and holding a bloody dagger in his left hand led me to believe the words in Latin read ‘murder’, or any variation of the word.
“I’m truly annoyed,” the Hermit added. “Why couldn’t he have mixed it up a little, chose something like lust and theft. You know, I got one like that not long ago and the Hell I made for him was one of my best!”
The Hermit started to go into the details, but the Devil stopped him.
“Please,” the Devil said, shaking his head, “let’s get on with this. We’ve got to be back soon.” He tapped his wrist as if tapping a watch.
“Oh, alright.”
The Hermit took my last card, flipped it face-up and placed it next to the second.
“And it just gets worse,” the Hermit said with a sigh and a snarl. “Very well, for ‘The Punishment’ you chose ‘confinement’.”
And then the Hermit stood and began to pace.
“Ah!” he shouted suddenly. “I have just the Hell for you to see! Not one of my best, but for someone like you, who feels bad for stepping on a spider, the Hell of Samuel J. Hennicot should serve its purpose.”
Swiftly, the Hermit shifted his look toward the Devil. “And if it doesn’t, then too goddamned bad.”
The Devil said nothing.
I raised my head and saw that I was not sitting with the Devil and the Hermit anymore.
Stone walls and cell bars surrounded me. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a dirty pool of water near my bare feet. I was not me anymore, old or young. And when I tried to speak, or even just rise to stand and look out the tall black bars that held me prisoner, I knew I was nobody here; only a guest in the body of someone who had been damned. Within seconds, I felt this man’s pain and regret as if it were my own. I could see the pictures in the man’s mind as though they were images I had conjured myself. The woman with long, flowing hair. The way she ran through the courtyard, free and innocent like a child. The radiant smile, the contagious laughter. The side of her face bashed in.
I, as Samuel shook off the memory.
“And what do you regret most?” said a guard.
Samuel lowered his head; his long, black hair fell near his eyes. “I regret meeting her,” he said. “I regret the scent of her hair, the softness of her skin.” He looked up at the hooded guard standing near him. “I regret killing her, but then it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always destroyed everything I’ve ever loved.”
The guard turned his back to Samuel, a large cluttered set of rusted keys jangling in his hand. The shuffling of rats in the cell next door became a constant companion in this dark and dank room befitting a murderer. Above him, hanging from the metal rail of his bed was a chain necklace, adorned with The Crucifixion of Christ somewhere underneath the beaten silver that had lost its shine so long ago. Dried in the crevices of Christ’s hair was the blood of Antissa.
In the corner of his eye, Samuel could see the movement of the guard’s hands underneath his draping sleeves, motioning for him to stand. Voices, cries of pain and maniacal laughter echoed through the hallway, but to Samuel they were hardly audible. The reality of this time had done its job to drown out almost everything else around him. There was little light in this cell, save for a flickering bulb somewhere in the distance. Oh, how Samuel would have loved to have had a cell with a small box window so that he could look upon the moon one last time.
He stood, crossing his hands chained at the wrists and I could feel the penetrating cold of the metal down into my bones as though they were my hands.
“The final hour approaches,” said the guard, and in his voice there was a hiss. “Come.”
The guard pushed open the steel doors; a screeching echo filled the dungeon. Blood curdling screams pierced every cell. Footsteps were oddly booming in Samuel’s ears, just like the sound of water dripping and rats chewing the bones of carcasses. The stench of rotten flesh was a punishment in and of itself, enough to make the eyes water and sting.
Samuel followed the guard out into the hall, seeing for the first time in ages those who had been his neighbors. Flashes penetrated his mind, pictures of these strange people that were so familiar, yet so foreign.
“We are nearly there,” said the guard.
The guard never looked directly at him, but to Samuel it felt like his eyes were always on him, following his every trembling move.
“What will you do when you see her?”
“See who?” Samuel turned toward the guard, slightly perplexed.
“Antissa,” the guard answered with that eerie hiss. “She waits for you at the end of the stair, like she always does.”
The guard looked directly at Samuel this time, but no face could be seen. Only blackness appeared to lurk behind that old hood. “Ad infinitum,” the guard added and began to walk again.
“But I don’t understand any of this.”
“You will soon, only to forget again. But what will you say to Antissa when you see her again, Samuel?”
Samuel could not answer; the moment was too surreal for him to fathom. It felt to him as though he had been here before, doing the same thing as he and the guard descended the rock stairs that seemed endless. All sense of time was consumed by the darkness and the wind around them. The air was cold and dusty in the back of his throat. The shackles binding his ankles weighed down his already slow-paced steps, and there he saw her, Antissa, standing at the bottom of the stair waiting for him. His shackles were gone as though they had never been there, and he walked toward her, the woman that he had loved all his long life but could never have. She had been married to his younger brother, John, who just happened to be the unattractive of the two. Samuel always got the women; those he never wanted anything more from than the sweetness between their legs. Samuel was the accomplished brother, for John had barely completed college and had no talent whatsoever, unless smoking pot was a talent. Samuel drove the nice car. John rode an expensive bike. It was a no-brainer: why would someone like Antissa, blond and beautiful, soft and pure with the prettiest emerald eyes Samuel had ever seen, choose John over him?
“I’m sorry, Sam,” said Antissa. “I didn’t know you felt that way about me.”
“I’ve always loved you; since we were kids. I wanted you long before my idiot brother, who was too busy molesting his surfboard to notice you.”
Antissa’s face was gentle and compassionate. “But when did you, Sam? I don’t recall it. I’m so very sorry.”
Samuel felt a ticking in his head, and I felt it too, just as I was feeling everything that Samuel was feeling. I could feel the rage begin as a spot just at the back of my head. The ticking grew and became his voice, the evil Samuel fighting with his better half, and winning.
“That doesn’t matter now,” Samuel said with such defeat. “I’ll never know what it’s like to be with you.”
Antissa softly shut her eyes. Her skin was so soft that Samuel knew it must feel like heaven to touch it. Her innocence was of a simple perfection, t
he kind that only few souls truly possess in the world. How could one human being utterly tear a man down with only a glance?
Samuel gritted his teeth. He could not stand it any longer, and I felt this sudden dread overtake him. Overtake me. Something horrible was about to happen and Samuel was going to be the one to do it. I could do nothing to stop it, the pain and anger far too great to be contained.
“Kill her!” said a voice so close that Samuel could feel its hot breath on his ear. “Cut her up in little pieces, Samuel. Bash her fucking brains in until she’s dead, dead, dead!”
I felt Samuel’s mind on the verge of exploding and I tried to stop him, to get out of Samuel’s body, but the only control I had was my ability to see and feel, knowing I could do absolutely nothing to help her.
In a flash Antissa was falling. The blond of her silk hair soiled quickly by the color of blood. The first blow had come too fast for Antissa to react, hitting her so severely that the crushed skull rendered her powerless to scream. Samuel threw himself on top of her, raining blow after blow with a heavy object that might have been a paperweight, or a bookend. Samuel never knew what he had killed her with, a detail insignificant in comparison to its final use.
I would have fainted if fainting was allowed, but throughout the brutal murder, I felt my own mind slipping further and further away from me. I could feel myself raising my own hands in rage and the weight of the bloodied object grasped in my fingers. Before long, Samuel and I were completely the same. I screamed out Antissa’s name as I hit her. The sound of her face crushing under the weight of the murder weapon was not horrific now, but satisfying. Her beautiful emerald eyes were smashed beyond recognition into the crushed bone of her skull.
And then I stopped.
I looked down at the lifeless body of Antissa between my legs as I held the murder weapon high above my head. At first, I was confused. What was going on? What had I done? And then, like that first blow Samuel used to knock Antissa from her feet, I was hit with the cruel realization of what Samuel had just committed, what I had just committed. Rage turned to regret and pain, the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I wanted to die right then, but also I wanted to hold her again in my arms. I carefully pulled Antissa’s body into my lap and rocked her. I cried and cried until my stomach ached so terribly that I could feel it in my legs and in the top of my head. And it was in this moment that Samuel J. Hennicot knew where he was and what was about to happen to him all over again.
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