by Sawyer Black
His hand hovered above the doorknob, wanting to turn it and find his family was on the other side, but he somehow knew it was something far worse waiting instead.
Still, if going through Hell was the only way to reach his family, the journey was worth it.
Henry opened the door, crossed the threshold, and found himself standing in the middle of an endless road, his house no longer behind him. He took a few steps, then the road twisted into a vacuum of black with nothing above, below, or around him. Just as quickly, he took another two steps and the world began to fill itself in, like a video game slowly rendering his surroundings.
A broken city sprawled across his vision, crumbling to the right, left, and everywhere around him. It was worse than ruined, and unlike anything Henry had ever seen. The city didn’t seem old or new, it simply looked destroyed, as if that was how it had been forever and would be for always.
Thousands of mountainous buildings lay fallen and crumbled, collapsed in countless stages of decay. Angry black clouds churned in the charcoal sky. As they stirred, Henry felt like the air above was somehow sucking every cell of hope from his body. Maybe it was the city itself.
A million shades of gray and black sent Henry to his knees.
If he was already dead, then he was ready to perish again.
He could never save his family, so why even try?
Giving up was the easiest thing in the world. He’d done it hundreds of times. An encore meant nothing.
Henry rocked back and forth, staring out at an endless landscape of broken city, as a stark loneliness deeper than anything he had ever felt before swelled inside him. He tried thinking of Sam and Amélie. There was something he was supposed to do, some sort of danger to keep them from. Without him, everything was lost.
He ignored the charcoal world and closed his eyes, trying to remember.
Henry lifted his eyelids and looked at the city from under his brow. Gasping as he stood, Henry turned in a helpless circle, looking at the countless mangled faces staring back at him from a million broken windows. Dark creatures that weren’t quite people, hiding in buildings that weren’t quite buildings, all of them fixing their awful eyes upon on him, the weight of their collective gaze adding a blaze to his despair.
He had to get away, or he’d surely forget everything and wind up with them, staring from a decayed window for all of eternity. Henry ran down the broken road.
Fire licked his blood as he pushed his body to race harder and faster toward the horizon. Lit with the thinnest seam of light, just bright enough to seed his hope. Henry’s lungs seemed one wrong breath from collapse, until it dawned on him that the fatigue was only in his head.
After running for what felt like hours, Henry realized there were no limits in this place.
He ran faster, and the crumbled city started to fade, eaten by the growing light. As Henry moved closer, the brilliant shining was sucked into a deep blue horizon, wide and open enough to shame Montana.
But even the skies were nothing compared to the Tree.
The Tree, taller than the broken towers behind him, pulled Henry into itself. His churning feet rose from the road, and he let himself go, holding his arms out so his body was a cross as he floated toward the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
The Tree’s grace was enough to make Henry cry. He floated into the same breeze that kissed its bark, and when he saw the damage marring its surface, his lips parted with a sob that shook his shoulders.
Chocolate-colored limbs lay in brittle piles of decay scattered around the base. Each broken branch seemed to scream. Fresh green tendrils bloomed from the trunk, crying for light. Farther up, small buds blossomed into larger blooms and murmured to Henry: Hope isn’t dead.
He floated closer to the Tree and remembered everything. The pain of having Samantha and Amélie ripped from his life closed his throat, and he dared to believe he was inside a dream for the first time since opening the door to the certainty of Hell.
Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe this was something else. Something better. Something he could still wake from. Maybe Henry could still save his family because there were no intruders in his home, and his family was safe and snoring.
Henry raced toward the possible truth, trying to convince himself that it was only a dream. Something as beautiful and tragic as the Tree would have to be. Searching for any false thread that might unravel his nocturnal facade, Henry rounded the trunk before falling to his feet on the other side of the Tree. And there he encountered a magnificent clearing.
The grass was especially green against the azure sky. A long stone table rested in the center. It could have sat a hundred, though it held only two. The table was an icy gray, except for where two men sat across from each other, staring, a chessboard between them.
After being alone for what felt like so long, Henry was grateful to find others inside his dream. His loneliness began to ebb away. Maybe they could help him wake up.
As Henry approached the table, the world grew more colorful still. Another thousand trees thickened the distance while miles of fresh lavender rippled the grassy slopes in purple rows.
Neither man turned to Henry, though he could feel them certain of his presence. He took another small, tentative step, feeling almost as if he were invading some tranquil ceremony. A ritual with importance. Religious fear tingled his body. He felt eyes on his back, a scrutiny that begged him to run.
He almost longed for the figures in the windows.
He turned, but the dark city behind him had grown into teeth, darkening the horizon like an inky grin, as if threatening to grow and encroach on the beautiful life thriving in the garden. He flinched back, his ass running into the table’s edge. He spun with an indrawn hiss of embarrassment.
Neither man looked away from their game. Each player had only two pieces. A king and a knight.
“Hello?” Henry said, quietly at first, then again but louder.
His third cry, nearly as loud as the second, but half as timid, drew the attention of the gentleman on Henry’s side of the table. The man turned to Henry, his wavy hair a dirty pewter, nuzzling his shoulders. His skin was the color of bark, and wrinkled like an old tree. His eyes were marbles, both snow white like his robes.
Across from him sat a sun-kissed Spaniard, with hair thick and dark as coal, though not nearly as black as his robes. He looked up at Henry and nodded, staring with sky-blue eyes, no pupils, and a smile like a crescent moon.
“Where am I?” Henry asked, trembling.
The man in white stared. Henry heard the man’s voice in his head.
Why ask what you already know?
Henry swallowed. “Am I …”
“Dead? Yes.” The dark-haired man rose from the table, floated over it, and moved toward Henry, leaving the game and the glow around it.
“No.” Henry shook his head, arguing mostly with himself. “This isn’t possible. Not you or any of this.”
“You’re right,” said the man in black.
“Where am I? Where are Sam and Amélie?”
The man in black said nothing.
“Where am I?” Henry repeated.
The man in black ignored him as their world faded into a roiling mist, smearing their surroundings into something hazy and white. He smiled. “You’re in Nowhere. Now pay attention. This is the best part of the show so far, where we get to see all your personal demons.”
Henry peered into the mist, squinting until everything blurred. He blinked as color started to swallow its absence.
But the colors were wrong.
Every horrible shade from Henry’s abbreviated life appeared everywhere at once. Memories spilled onto the fog like three-dimensional film. It seemed as if Henry could step into every frame, if he only knew how.
Henry watched as his past self took the stage for the first time, hunched and painted in sweat, standing with a microphone a foot above the ground, knees shaking through the joke. Then, as a sophomore, paired with Cheryl Johnson for lab.
Getting partnered with Cheryl was the best thing that could ever happen to a fat piece of shit like him. He bent over and sneezed, sending a long anal salute out of his ass and into the air. Cheryl laughed, and the entire class followed.
Memories fell. Beatings. Humiliations. Personal atrocities. Splattering like rain from a cloud.
Good things and glad moments. Triumphs and victories. They blurred in and out of his quickly-collapsing world, the little bit of happiness left barely bleeding through the thick seams of misery.
“What is this place?” Everything about it made him want to cry. "You said Nowhere, but what the Hell does that mean?”
“This is where we wait,” said the man in white from his spot at the table. He pinched the knight between his pointer and thumb, then moved it two spaces up and one across.
“Wait for what?”
“To go one place or the other.”
“What the Hell are you talking about?”
“Bingo!” said the man in black with a smile, still standing, but no longer looking at Henry.
“What?”
“No, the part after,” said the man in white.
“After what?”
The man in black turned to Henry, his blue eyes heavy with fatigue. “You said what the Hell. He said one place or the other. Heaven or Hell, this is where we wait.”
“You mean … Purgatory?”
“Yes.” The man in white smiled at Henry as if he’d won a prize.
“No, this is some sorta fucking dream. A bad trip or something.”
“No, it’s quite real,” the man in white said. “You are dead. This is where we wait. You’ve known this since before you arrived and are only feigning ignorance now.” He stared into Henry’s eyes with his creepy all-white gaze, then gestured toward the table. “Have a seat.”
Henry sat. The man in black sighed and sat beside him.
Henry looked at the board. Still four pieces. “Do you know if my wife and daughter are okay?”
“I do not.” The man in white shook his head.
“Do you know how I get back?”
“You don’t,” he said, eyes still on his pieces, like it was his move instead of the Spaniard’s.
“I have to know what happened to my family. If I’m dead, then they might be, too. They were in danger when—”
“Danger?”
“Yes. Three men broke into our fucking house. I don’t know what happened after I was shot.”
Henry smashed his fist into the stone table as he imagined, or remembered, Sam getting dragged through the foyer by her beautiful black hair, then up the stairs toward the bedrooms, past a still-screaming Amélie. Henry shook whatever it was from his mind. Fantasy or memory, it didn’t matter.
“This is a dream. I have to wake up!”
The man in black said, “No, definitely not a dream.”
“It is!” Henry roared, willing to murder to make it so, if only someone would show him who to kill. “There’s no such thing as Purgatory! You’re all figments of my fucked-up imagination, a result of some bad acid in high school or something. So, do me a favor and tell me how to get the fuck out of Oz.”
The man in white shook his head. “Worrying makes things worse. You’re safe now. And that’s all that matters.” He stood, smiled, and gently set his hands on Henry’s shoulders. “Relax. In Nowhere, patience is everything.”
“No.” Henry shook the man’s hands away. “Fuck that! Three men came into my house to hurt my family! I have to get back and help them.” His voice crumbled into a choke. “I have to know.”
“No.” The man in white shook his head. “Worrying makes things worse. It brings out the Lost. And we don’t want the Lost, do we? You’re safe. That’s all that matters now. Patience is—”
“They’re in danger now!” Henry yelled, wondering if someone had laced his weed.
That is the last time I buy from the dude with the purple hair. Didn’t someone once say you should never buy your shit from a dude with purple hair? If not, that NEEDS to be a fucking T-shirt.
“You’ve been gone too long to help them now.” The man in white still had a lunatic’s smile.
“What do you mean, too long?”
“You’ve been dead at least seven hours.”
“Wait,” Henry said. “You said I’ve been gone too long. Does that mean I can go back?”
The man in white turned and looked up, gazing at the Tree with wide eyes as though it had just appeared.
“Henry wants to know if he can return,” said the man in black. “Should we tell him?”
“Wait. How do you know my name?”
The man in black sighed. “Really, Henry? With your family and all of this?” He waved his hand through the memories and misfortune still raining behind them. “And that’s what you want to know? Mountains or minutia, Henry. You must focus.”
He wanted to hate the man in black, but the man had answers. “Can I go home?”
“Yes,” said the man in black, smiling wide as he offered Henry his hand.
Henry, not knowing what else to do, took it. The man in black’s robe was replaced by a shiny black suit with a perfectly knotted raspberry tie. “What the …?”
“Now, now.” The man wrapped an arm gently around Henry’s shoulders. He led him away from the long stone table, farther from the Tree and back toward the road. The buildings were no longer broken or crumbled. Lush orchards now lined either side, bookending a cobbled path paved with freshly scrubbed brick.
The man in black pulled Henry close, as if about to reveal a secret.
“Come. I’m going to tell you how to get back home.”
CHAPTER 3
“Name’s Boothe. That’s booth with an e if you’re adding me to your correspondents.” The man in black smiled like he was selling toothpaste.
Before Henry could respond, his attention was pulled to a scampering from behind. He turned, surprised to see the man in white falling in stride beside them.
Boothe turned to the man in white, irritated. “Do you really need to be here, Randall?”
“Do you really need an answer?”
Boothe ignored Randall and turned back to Henry. “You’re here because you aren’t ready for anywhere else. Does that make sense?”
Henry was surprised that it did make sense, even if he was confused and feeling mildly disoriented as the man in black spoke.
He nodded. This was where he was supposed to be.
“Good, then this will be easy to understand. You’re not quite ready for up there.” He pointed to the now nearly periwinkle sky. “And you certainly aren’t going to want to go down there.” His pointer dangled above the grass. “And no one wants to stay here, even though it’s arguably better than down there.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Randall said.
Boothe laughed as though the other man were stupid. “There are two ways to break boredom in Nowhere.” He jerked his thumb toward Randall’s scowl. “Play with him, or help people like you. I’m forced by circumstance to play with him no matter what.”
“Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to manipulate you. He’s a demon.”
Boothe laughed, bending over and clutching his stomach. Then he stumbled to a halt and caught his breath. He stood with a sigh, wiping the tears from his eyes. “You have no idea how long the two of us have been at this, Henry. Some days, it really does feel like forever. Of course I am trying to manipulate you. Have you ever managed to get one thing you wanted in life without manipulating the situation?” He gave Henry a second to answer, then went ahead and did it for him. “Of course not! That doesn’t preclude my goals and yours from intersection. Would you like to go home, Henry?”
“Why would you help me get home?” Henry asked, dizzy.
“That’s need-to-know information,” Boothe said. “And you don’t. Would you like to go home or not? If yes, I can help. If no, please leave so I can return to the table and take Randall’s knight.”
Randall stopped walki
ng, took Henry by the arm, and pulled his eyes toward him. He seemed ages older than Boothe, and his voice was shaky and frail. “Henry, please listen.”
A hundred million colors disappeared. Randall’s world was nothing but white.
“You want to get up there?” He glanced at the empty above. “If you take what he’s offering, you’ll be in Nowhere forever, like him.” He scowled, slightly turning his head. “Or, you’ll end up down there.”
“Are you telling me that I shouldn’t make a deal with the Devil?”
Boothe laughed. “Devil? Hah! I wish.”
Randall shot Boothe a nasty look. “Something like that.”
“I don’t know what to believe. I’m probably tripping my balls off, standing on 45th and screaming at a lamppost. But if this is somehow real, and my wife and daughter are in danger, then I need to get back.”
“I can help you with that,” Boothe cooed. “You come with me, and I’ll bring you home. You can see your wife and child right away.”
“Don’t trust him,” Randall said.
Henry turned to Randall. “Can you tell me if my family is safe?”
He stared back at Henry, quietly pleading with him to not be a fool. Henry said nothing, waiting until Randall shook his head. “No. Of course I can’t say that.”
“Then sorry,” Henry said. “But circle gets the square.”
“He’s going to trick you, Henry. You already know this. It’s when, not if.”
“If this is real, fine. He’s welcome to trick me after he helps me find my family.”
“Don’t mind him,” Boothe said. “He gets fussy because he doesn’t know how to get people to play with him.”
Henry turned to Boothe. “It’s true, right? You are trying to trick me.”
“No,” Boothe said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Technically, I am a demon. But that particular word is absurd for my character, though I can do nothing to alter your interpretation, entirely misinformed as it is, constantly reinforced by a lifetime of cartoon dogma. I am not the Devil, and you’ve signed no contract, or done anything binding. Your eternal soul is yours to keep. Best of luck with it. I’m tricking you like a well-crafted television commercial tricks you into buying exactly what you want.”