by Stephen Biro
I opened my eyes and saw the maze twist and turn away from me 13 paces ago, as if I went backwards and forwards at the same time. I had to test it out more, because it already seemed like it worked. Even though, I was lost again in my own visual interpretation.
I closed my eyes. The white light in the darkness of my vision flared up in front of me as I stepped forward. I took another slow step and then another. I almost began to chuckle but thought against it with my next step.
I walked towards that small light I could see with my eyes closed, actually gaining momentum in each stride. It was as if it was 100 yards away, and each step was a yard and a half. But it wasn’t.
I walked with my eyes closed for so long I didn’t have a sense for where I was any more. Following the white light became excruciating, so I had to stop. I took a breath and opened my eyes, very slowly.
Mirrors on all sides surrounded me. The trapped souls were even viler than they’d been at the beginning of the maze, and I could hear:
“I’m the most famous person on the planet.”
“People worship me.”
“I’m more beautiful than god.”
“Everyone will bow down because I am everything to everyone.”
“I am my own god.”
I choked on my own bile. I closed my eyes again, and the light was as it was, so I took a couple of steps again.
Nothing hit me, nothing stopped me. I could still hear what they said, though. I began walking towards the light again. I realized it was an open space as long as I didn’t look or use my eyes.
I fucking ran for it. I didn’t care if I hit anything. I didn’t care if I hurt myself. I had to escape, lest I be stuck here. I fretted about the thought of falling into a mirror and loving myself into damnation.
My stride hit a peak, and the light got closer and closer until I slammed into a wall. I hit it hard and was knocked to the floor, causing my jaw agonizing pain. I thought I had knocked my teeth loose, so I tried to wiggle my teeth with my tongue. They didn’t move.
I almost laughed my ass off at this point; Here I am, worried about knocking my teeth loose in Hell when a demon would be more than happy to yank them with pliers, one by one, only to shove them back in so as to repeat the process.
I didn’t know where I was, but I knew I’d hit something that stopped me, so I opened my eyes to see the stone wall of a tunnel. I had actually hit something physically normal. I turned backwards to see the route I had taken. There was the maze, sitting in all of its Hellish glory. I could hear the chatter and the praises but more in a “distant stadium rabble” way than the one-on-one conversations I had heard inside.
I turned back towards the entrance of the tunnel and I expected to see a light or something that had guided me from the maze but there wasn’t anything.
Trying to think how things work in Hell, I closed my eyes and looked around, everywhere.
I saw a new light that wasn’t there before. This time it was a red speckle. It was shining from the direction I had come, and I stared at it for a reasonable amount of time, thinking.
I made up my mind, opened my eyes and turned back towards the tunnel’s entrance. I walked up to the gateway, to the cold and barren stone.
I didn’t know what was on the other side of that tunnel but I either had to find my place in Hell, or find my way through Hell. I also didn’t know if I was dying or if I was already dead. My mind recounted my visitation by God so maybe this is something He wanted to show me, something I needed to know.
All I knew was I had to press onward. I began to walk into it. My soul shifted and I felt something I had known before but had never wanted to acknowledge. I felt another of my major sins crawling up my vertebrae, just as it had when nestling in my head a thousand times before. I took a deep breath, possibly the deepest breath ever taken in Hell. I stepped over the threshold and out of the Maze of Vanity.
THE CAVERN OF SLOTH
I walked past the gateway into what I already knew. I could feel it in my bones, because it gave me a metallic taste in my mouth as I took my first couple steps. My ears began to ring, and my mouth became dry. I took a couple more steps, and the ringing spread to my head. The metallic taste turned to cinnamon, which tasted good. My bones began to lighten, and I felt better as each step took me deeper. My mouth began to produce saliva again, and I felt normal again.
I walked and trotted into the tunnel and felt good, felt right. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before, even when I had been alive on earth. I felt as if I belonged and as if I was going where I should. I just marched along to a beat of a drum I’d never heard before.
But as I walked towards my destination, my mind began nagging at me. It somehow felt “roomy” in my head. Something wasn’t right but I still kept going.
Over the course of 20 steps, I began to notice something. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I could feel it. My thoughts raced at a million miles per hour, but my body acted as if it was going at normal speed. Then my body wasn’t even managing normal speed. I was barely moving.
My steps were in slow motion while my mind was fast as ever. Ideas and thoughts where careening towards each other and smashing into the realm of time and space I call my mind. It has never raced so supersonically relative to my body.
I tried to think slower, comparing it to my body. I tripped and then slowly fell forward, but my mind produced hours’, maybe even days’ worth of thoughts in the time it took me to fall.
Madness tugged at me during my slow-motion fall. I was going insane due to the gap between my body’s reaction and my mind’s rapidity of thought.
As I hit the floor, I felt a rash of spikes, glass and jagged edges penetrate my flesh, ever-so-slowly.
My mouth gradually produced a slow-motion scream of agony. The feeling of a wound gradually worsening is infinitely more painful than quick nick. A normal injury is fast and sudden, and the mind doesn’t have a chance of keeping up with the pain as it happens. This was the exact opposite—realizing every millisecond of the pain and infliction your body takes, knowing you are unable to stop it, while the injury grows worse.
The glass and metal slid increasingly deeper into my flesh, and I was at the mercy of my own racing mind. My eyes were the only part of my body that operated at normal speed. I saw the whole floor was embedded with glass, spikes, and jagged pieces of rusty metal. My hands slowly raised themselves, trying to break my fall, and I could see that they were headed straight for pain and injury.
I felt glass slowly dig into my flesh, each millimeter digging deeper and deeper over what seemed like hours, days. Each new piece of metal and glass touched my skin for what felt like an eternity before slowly puncturing my skin. Then another one, half an inch away from the previous, would touch me. As the first one sunk in, the pressure of the next split the skin.
My hands and forearms began to hit, and the slow, deliberate shredding of my flesh continued. The sharpness pierced my torso. I felt the spikes and glass scrape against my bones. My consciousness couldn’t handle it any more. I tried to black out but couldn’t.
But the days/weeks/years of suffering eventually yielded a new approach: A willing acceptance of the slow-motion damage occurring to my body. During the eons I had to think about it, the more I realized just to accept the pain and blood as a fact of my reality.
At some point, the glass and metal couldn’t go any farther into my body. My flesh had shredded and my veins had split, causing blood to flow in slow motion. My face had hit into jagged and serrated spikes that mauled my cheekbone, jaw but, thankfully, not my throat. My body had given up, and I had fallen flat onto the floor of the cave. I finally slammed into place.
That’s when time changed; my body picked up a little speed but still was lagging behind my mind. I screamed and tried to wiggle out, but my arms and legs were stuck. In fact, I didn’t even notice this about my appendages at the time, as I was more concerned with my impaled face. In any case, I had been slammed onto a surface made t
o incapacitate a man, much like a flytrap for a fly. I was stuck, wanting to pull free but unable.
I could feel my blood seep out of me with each and every tug. I flailed and flopped but couldn’t get out. I was stuck like a fish on a hook. It actually felt like a thousand hooks and probably was. My racing mind tried to make sense of what I was going through. That’s when it happened.
I stopped moving so the blood would slow its spillage. I began to lie perfectly still, accepting my fate. I let my body relax. I let everything slide deep into my body. And then I felt it:
The pain began numbing itself, and the sharp spikes and tidbits of glass started feeling as if they weren’t there anymore. The more I gave up, the less I moved, the more the pain went away. My muscles relaxed, and my damaged bones felt as if it had never happened. Even the bleeding stopped if I stayed still.
I lost every bit of drive. It was as if trying hurt. Moving and living was a pain. I was finally in a place where I could give it all up.
I lay there, breathing. I was ready to accept this as my final resting place. Any movement brought me agony, and all stillness brought me relief. I laid there for what seemed like decades. I gave my mind a pass to stop thinking. I’d never been able to stop thinking, during prayer, stillness, or even bedtime. I’d never been able to turn off my imagination. But here, finally, I could.
I did, though, think about what I had done and what I had hoped to do. I realized that what I was doing—standing still, not bettering my place in the universe—went against all my beliefs. So I latched onto a thought that was zooming around my head, believing in me. I slowed it down to grab it, as it was a hard thought to grab; grasping it brought pain and disappointment. Grasping this thought didn’t necessarily mean I was going to reach the Promised Land. It didn’t mean my hard work would actually become something.
Millions of people work their asses off, only to fail. Hard work and dedication don’t always pay off, but if you never try, then you will always hate yourself. So you fail, grab the horse and jump back on. You might fall back off and get stomped on, and you might never succeed. If everyone got what they wanted, nobody would be working; everyone would be famous and rich.
This thought stung me like a hive of yellow jackets. That’s when I became mad. Mutilating-my-flesh mad. I pushed myself up, ripping my flesh and what felt like part of my soul. I could feel muscle and sinew pull out of me. Every wound screamed in unrelenting pain. My face was ripped apart from the serrated metal and glass, but it was a freedom I had never felt before. Blood poured out like a waterfall, but I kept going.
My hands grabbed on to the side of the cave wall, and I pulled myself up. I was off the floor of Hell. My exhausted body was desperate to fall back down, but my freedom and desire outweighed any secondary thoughts of respite.
I looked for a place to set my foot down after I had ripped it free. That’s when the tunnel began to melt. It wasn’t the rock structure of the tunnel that melted but merely the jagged edges and metallic spikes. My left foot was the last to break free, but it didn’t pull itself off; the spikes dissolved inside it.
I lifted my hands to my face, expecting a mutilated mess. I felt an urgency to fit the skin back over my face, but it wasn’t necessary. My fingers touched my face and found it whole again.
Faded, out-of-focus images took shape. The cavern was as deep as I thought it was. I could see the tunnel and the pit I’d walked into. But I also began to see other people, stuck to the floor of Hell as I had been. I breathed a sigh of pain and cried.
I took a step, and the nearby spikes and glass shimmied away from my foot. It was tough, but I forced myself to take another step. The sharpness crawled away from me again but stayed as close to my flesh as it could without cutting me. I took another and another until I was in full stride. I began to smile, that is until I looked at all who had come before me.
I listened and heard the sighs of people content, not moving. I could tell they heard me but acknowledgment of me would bring pain, and pain would bring sorrow, and sorrow would bring more pain. I don’t know why I had been able to get out of that trap. Its allure is powerful. Its trappings are way too easy.
The tunnel kept going down, and the sections became more elaborate. The tunnel became a cavern, and the cavern was filled with cubicles. I passed men and women sitting on barbed-wire chairs in front of blank computer screens. The cubicles gave way to living rooms, with people—impaled on spikes and glass fixed to cement couches—sitting before golden television sets. They were staring but not moving, no matter what was on the glowing screens. Glowing screens faded into beds and even the inside of cars, as people sat or lay there, afraid to do anything. They were afraid to live and try and fail, because failure is always an option. Every soul I saw stayed where it was. They were all impaled on their own jagged feelings of failure, and temptations to waste time and energy kept them stuck in the lower confines of Hell.
I was passing by a seat. I stopped. I looked at the man sitting there and could tell he could see me. His flesh was stabbed onto the sharpness of Hell. I saw his eyes turn to me, without his body moving. He looked, then shifted his eyes away. I took a step or two towards him. The blades flowed away like water.
“What you are you still doing here?” I asked. “You can see me and you can feel me walk past you. You don’t have to stay here anymore. You are free if you want to go.”
He closed his eyes and a small whimper eked out of his throat. He took another couple of seconds and croaked, “It has been an eternity now, so I have to answer you so that you will leave me alone. Why would you torment a man like me for thousands of years by asking me a question and standing there, for untold eons?”
My mind realized the Hell he was in. I was stuck in that Hell for what seemed like centuries when it was likely only a matter of seconds. My heart bled for him.
“I am so sorry for tormenting you for so long.”
I turned around and walked away as quickly as I could. I thought about the man. If he’d experienced 10,000 years in the seconds I’d told him of his potential freedom, and if he had 10,000 years to refuse get up, then he was truly lost.
Before leaving his earshot, I called back, “You can get up and get out of here. It’s ultimately more painful to remain, because the pain of doing nothing is even worse than doing something.”
The cavern turned towards a tunnel. I headed towards it while the sharpness ran from my feet. I began to wonder what it was I was truly in. As my steps became faster, I closed my eyes for a second, only to see the small hint of white light in front of me. I turned my head around and looked with closed eyes, only to see a speck of red, far behind me.
I opened my eyes and walked out of the Cavern of Sloth. The air hit me, but unlike the gusts of winds to which I was accustomed, the air wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t invigorating, and I didn’t feel safe.
THE AUDITORIUM OF THE ENVIOUS
I walked out of the mouth of the cavern, breathing a stink that almost dropped me to my knees; I couldn’t inhale without grimacing.
I saw a doorway on top of a cliff, and I suddenly found myself standing before it. The door was solid rock and about ten feet high with symbols engraved around the frame. I approached, and the doorway expanded to twenty feet high and seven feet wide. Then the door opened.
A “bright darkness” shone from it. My eyes tried to adjust, and I lost all my thoughts at this point. I walked up to the doorway and passed through and was several steps into the landscape when it hit me.
Envy. It crept up on me while trying to showcase itself to my soul. But it was not a sin that ever truly registered in my life.
The famous had tried their best on me by showing me their riches. They had fame and wealth to the point of opulence but it didn’t work. I was more than happy for them, that they had more than I could possibly dream of. Would it be nice? Probably. Who doesn’t want be rich or famous? But it’s certainly nothing to kill over, or ruin your life. So I understood envy somewhat. But I didn’
t let it control me, even when it has reared its ugly head to me.
Music and lights surrounded me. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I tried to stand there, to make sense of it all, but I couldn’t.
I found myself in a horde of people, ramping up and discharging all of the energy they had. I was lost in a sea of want and neglect that I couldn’t comprehend.
I was stuck in this crowd, unsure of exactly where I was. I held my breath and pushed forward. The throngs of people were intense. The inhabitants who surrounded me were lost in something I couldn’t understand, even when I had figured it out. I was still confused.
I knew this was meant to show envy, but it was harder for me to see how this reflected the sin and how it affected my life. I saw a gargantuan stage and three pedestals for four lucky souls, the ones they elevated. I saw everyone else kneeling, and I felt them praying.
They were praying to something I couldn’t comprehend. They were praying to something even they didn’t understand; they only knew they wanted and desired it. They wanted to understand how the few above them had things that should have been theirs.
I tried to work my way through everyone, but it seemed impossible. It was like trying to make your way to the front of a concert. Souls refused to move. Everyone was angry because of what they didn’t have or who they weren’t.
The music suddenly changed, and the elevated souls drifted down from their pedestals and from the stage. The masses beneath trembled. Then they mutated, with horns erupting from their heads and new mouths ripping apart their jawbones, turning them into gaping maws of vicious teeth.
They began jumping upward, trying to eat those they desired. I watched as a woman’s leg was torn off and swallowed whole by another woman. Arms were ripped off then used as clubs to beat the torsos of those they coveted.
Blood and organs slipped out of open wounds on the formerly elevated bodies. The envious lower souls continued to eat and dismember those of whom they were jealous.
The remains were eventually gone, and the masses stood up, staring at the ceiling. Lights began to blaze, and music began to thunder, and they all started fighting amongst each other for the honor of being envied.