Hell and Back

by Patricia Blackmoor

  “I’m sorry,” Parker said. “I didn’t mean to turn the conversation dark. It’s just a habit from being here so long, I think.”

  I shrugged. “It’s all right. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this anyway.”

  “Because you don’t have anyone else to talk to?”

  “It’s weird. I never thought I would miss that,” I said.

  “We all need socialization. Why do you think solitary in prison is such a threat?”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way before. When I was alive, I pretty much wanted people to leave me alone.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s sad.”

  “I was an introvert. Am. I don’t know.”

  “Even introverts need company sometimes.”

  A shout pierced through the screams. “Hey, Parker!”

  Parker turned around to see another one of the guards waving at him. He sighed heavily. “I’ve got to go. But if you ever want to talk, or need company, let me know.”

  A small smile pulled at my lips. “Yeah. I will.”

  I watched as he left.

  Parker paid me visits often. I found myself craving his company. Conversations with Parker made the time pass more quickly, and I enjoyed that he was smart and funny. He made me laugh sometimes, which was often nearly impossible to do in this hell hole.

  “Okay,” I said, pushing stray hair out of my face. My hair tie had broken a while ago, and so I had no choice but to let my dark hair fall into my face, even if I tried to braid it back. “Who was your first kiss?”

  “God,” he said, leaning his head back against my cage. “All right. Her name was Danielle. We were neighbors, and she was a year older than me. We hung out together a lot, and one time, when I was...maybe fourteen? We were watching a movie together, and she leaned in and kissed me.”

  “That’s cute. Were you dating?”

  “Um, no. She had a boyfriend. And apparently she told him, because he beat the shit out of me the next day.”

  I raised my eyebrows. He rarely used four-letter words, so I knew it must have been bad. “Did she at least apologize?”

  “Nope. Hardly saw her again. He got her pregnant and they moved away.”

  “Huh.”

  He turned to me. “What about you? Your first kiss?”

  I buried my head in my hands. “Oh God, I shouldn’t have even asked you.”

  “That bad?”

  “I was...awkward growing up. I was super sheltered, I went to a private school until I was in high school, and hardly anyone dated when we were younger. So my first kiss, my technical first kiss, was when I was sixteen and in a school play.”

  “So your first kiss—”

  “Was a stage kiss. Yep. In front of the whole cast. At least the guy was nice.”

  “Wow.”

  “Sad, huh?”

  “What about your real first kiss? First kiss that wasn’t a stage kiss?”

  “That was a few months later, when I got my first boyfriend. We were hanging out at a park, it was the summertime. We had been swinging on the swings. He got off first, then helped me off, pulled me into his arms, and kissed me.”

  “See, that’s sweet.”

  “I wish that had been my actual first kiss.”

  “What happened to the boyfriend?”

  I shrugged. “He moved away. We thought we could do long distance, but this was before everyone had video calling, so it definitely didn’t last very long once he moved. We’re still friends on Facebook, though. Or, we were.”

  “You said you had a boyfriend before you died?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “What was he like?”

  “His name was Mitchell. Is Mitchell still alive? I’d assume he’s still alive, but I guess I don’t remember my death.” My eyes got wide as I sat up straight, my heart pounding. “Oh my God, could he be here?”

  “What does he look like?”

  I tried to think, my mind feeling scrambled. “Tall. Blond, short hair, gray eyes. Twenty-six.”

  He shook his head. “No one like that in this section, and this is where he would have ended up.”

  My shoulders relaxed. “Good.”

  “Of course, depending on his religion, he might not have ended up here.”

  “We never talked much about religion,” I admitted. “After I had left my parents’ house, it didn’t become as important to me anymore. I don’t know what religion he identifies with.”

  He was quiet for a long moment. “Do you still want to try to get out of here?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation. We need to. We have to.”

  “I’m still looking for a way out. I haven’t had much luck, though. If I get caught wandering too far from my post, I run the risk of getting stuck with a partner, and then there’s no way I can I look for a way out then. I’ve tried to ask, subtly, but I’ve gotten nothing but blank stares or threats.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said.

  The thought of Parker being tortured for something I had asked him to do made me wince. My concern for Parker was selfish, too. I needed him to visit me, needed to spend time with him. I didn’t like us being pulled apart. When he was gone, I was left isolated in my prison, unable to stretch out in this too-small cell. I wished I had something to write with, something to read. I had tried using my finger to write in the floor of the cell, but the ground was too hard, and I couldn’t leave any marks behind.

  Nothing to read either, here in this place. Of course not; literature was the work of the enlightened, the escape for the desperate. I would have considered a world without books to be hell anyway, but being without them and also being tapped here was the worst nightmare I could imagine for myself.

  I’d tried counting, tried keeping track of the seconds and minutes, but I always lost track once I ended up in the hundreds. I was running out of ways to keep myself entertained in this cell. My mind wandered, creating stories to keep my mind active, but I was slowly beginning to unravel. Things only seemed stable when Parker was visiting.

  I longed to touch him. Or rather, I longed for him to touch me. I had hated touch in life, avoiding it unless it was for greetings, goodbyes, or sex. I didn’t like hugs or cuddles. But it had been so long since I’d felt the touch of another human’s skin on my own, and all I wanted was to feel Parker’s flesh against mine.

  It had been a little while since our conversations about first kisses and significant others when Parker came my way. He wasn’t happy or grinning like he usually was when he came to visit me. Instead, his face was somber, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Rough day?” I asked. I still hadn’t gotten used to the lack of days down here.

  He didn’t answer, just stuck the key into the lock and turned it, the normal click drowned out by the screams of hell.

  My eyes widened. “Did you find a way out?”

  He shook his head, still not meeting my eyes. He reached inside my cell and took my arm. For the first time in forever I felt the pressure of skin against mine. I gasped at the touch, and the surprise of it threw me, so I didn’t understand the meaning of it.

  “Come on,” he said softly.

  “Parker, what...what’s going on?”

  “Come on, Meg.”

  I dug my heals in. “Parker, wait, what’s going on?”

  “We have to go.”

  His strength was unexpected. I’d thought I could fight him, but his position as a guard must have come with extra strength because he dragged me out of my cell like I was nothing.

  “Parker, no, please no,” I said, eyes burning with tears that would never fall.

  “I’m sorry, Meg. I’m so sorry.”

  “Parker—”

  He didn’t look back at me as he pulled me across the floor to the stairs by the pit. For the first time I could see what caused the orange glow: a mix of lava and fire down below, people bathed in it, screaming with pain that would never kill them. With everything that
I had, I fought as he dragged me down the endless staircase, gasping, sobbing, begging him to stop.

  “I don’t have a choice,” he said over and over again.

  “Parker, don’t make me do this. Please. I can’t handle pain.”

  “I don’t have a choice, Meg.”

  We reached the ground floor, the heat excruciating on my skin. Circled around the pit of fire were dark arches. I couldn’t see into them, and I’m sure that was the point, but something about them made my stomach sink.

  “No Parker, no, please, no, don’t make me go in there, please.”

  His eyes were full of pain as he looked at me. “I’m so sorry, Meg.”

  He pushed me into one of the caves, and darkness enveloped me.

  Chapter Seven

  The pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

  When I was twelve, I broke my leg falling out of a tree. When I first got my period, I would have migraines for a week every month. When I was eight, I’d had my appendix taken out moments before it burst.

  This was nothing like that. It didn’t even come close. Every single cell in my body was screaming in pain, each nerve on fire. Had I been alive, the pain would have been so extreme that I would have been in and out of consciousness. But I wasn’t alive, and I was awake for every second of the eons of torture.

  When it was finished they threw me out of the darkness into the heat of the pit. The sudden brightness and heat was too much for my senses, and I collapsed to the ground.

  “Meg!” Parker rushed to my side, his hands on my waist.

  “Parker,” my voice was faint, breaking, not more than a croak.

  “I’m right here,” he said, his breath in my ear. “Come on, you’ve got to stand. I’ll bring you back to your cell.”

  He stood up, arms outstretched to me. I reached to take his hand, but my fingers missed. It hurt too much to lift my arm.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to, Meg. Come on. You can do it.”

  He squatted down next to me, taking my hands in his, pulling me. The tug on my muscles was agonizing, the pain forcing me to cry out.

  “Meg, you have to get up, or they’ll drag you back in. Come on.”

  The threat of more torture terrified me, but I couldn’t find the strength inside me to climb to my feet. Everything hurt too badly that using my muscles was unimaginable.

  Parker’s voice had taken on an urgency. “Meg, Meg, come on. You need to get up. It’s too dangerous. Please, you need to get up.”

  “I can’t.”

  He bit his lip. “All right.”

  He bent down again and put an arm around my waist, pulling me up to my feet. I put my weight onto his shoulders as I tried to straighten out my legs, but the pain was too great. I collapsed back to the floor of the pit, rogue embers searing my skin. It only added onto the pain, but it wasn’t as terrible as trying to stand. I simply didn’t have the strength.

  “Meg, you’ve got to try,” Parker begged me, a crease forming on his forehead.

  “I am. I can’t stand, Parker. I can’t.”

  He pinched his lips together. “Okay. Okay, here we go.”

  Parker reached down again, but this time, instead of trying to force me to stand, he pulled me up so I was cradled in his arms, my arms around his neck, head resting on his shoulder. Parker’s arms were strong, and he didn’t falter as he carried me across the pit and up the long, winding staircase.

  I clutched at his clothes, savoring the feeling of someone else’s body against mine. I imagined that when he was alive, he had probably smelled good, but now all that I could smell was sulfur and smoke, clogging my nostrils and lungs. I tried to breathe, hoping to regulate my pain, but the hot air only seared my throat, raw from my unending screams.

  I had thought that Parker would dump me off into my cell again, but I was wrong. Instead, he pulled me into an alcove right near my cell, an alcove shrouded in shadow.

  “I can’t keep you here too long,” he said. “But long enough to help you recover a little bit, hopefully.”

  “Thank you,” I said as he set me down gently on the floor. Parker sat down beside me, leaning his back against the wall. He slipped a hand under my shoulder and pulled me so my head rested on his lap.

  “Stretch out,” he said. “It might be your only chance for a while.”

  I did as he told me, stretching my legs out so I was lying flat on my back for the first time since I’d arrived here. It might have felt good if the pain hadn’t been so extreme.

  We sat there for a long time, my eyes closed, savoring the sensation of my head in his lap, trying to block out the pain. It didn’t work, of course. The pain would be lingering for a long, long time.

  My body was a patchwork of bruises, burns, and blood. My shirt had been torn just above my bellybutton, and the flesh there was raw. I briefly worried about getting an infection before realizing that my body didn’t work the same way it had on earth. I wouldn’t be catching anything that would kill me here. Hell didn’t come with that luxury.

  I shifted slightly and whimpered unintentionally.

  “Meg?”

  “Sorry, I’m okay.”

  “Don’t apologize. Please don’t. If anything, I should be the one apologizing to you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m the one who dragged you down there.”

  I forced my thoughts through the haze of pain. “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “You’re one of those,” I said with a painful breath.

  “One of what?”

  “One of those people who feels guilty for things, even if they aren’t your fault.”

  He paused, fingers lingering on my battered arm. I closed my eyes. “I suppose that’s not untrue.”

  “That’s a double negative,” I groaned.

  He chuckled before becoming somber. “Still, I should have...I don’t know.”

  I reached over and found his hand, interlacing my fingers with his. When was the last time I had held someone’s hand? The comfort made me want to cry, if only I could produce tears.

  We lay there like that in silence, his hand in mine. His thumb absentmindedly stroked mine. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

  “Why have you been so kind to me?” I asked him, when the pain had subsided enough that I could find my voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have to be so nice to me,” I said. “I’m sure there are other things you’d rather be doing. You could just leave me in my cell.”

  He shook his head, eyes not meeting mine. “No, I couldn’t.”

  I scoffed. “I forgot, you’re a nice person. I haven’t met many of those in my life, many truly nice people.”

  He still didn’t meet my eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You speak about yourself as if you weren’t a nice person.”

  “I wasn’t. I’m not.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “You didn’t know me when I was alive.”

  “But I know you now.”

  “You know the person I am sitting in a cell, cut off from the rest of the population. You don’t know who I was when I was alive.”

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  “I robbed banks.”

  “That’s not so bad. Like you said, they could afford it.”

  “Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

  “What?”

  “Stop trying to make me out to be a good person. Stop.”

  He was quiet for several moments. “Do you know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think that if you were to go back to Earth, if you had a chance to live your life over again, you’d be a great person.”

  “You’re optimistic.”

  “It’s honestly what I think.”

  “You have no proof of that,” I said, but warmth blossomed in my heart. When was the last time that had happened?
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  “Nothing concrete,” he acknowledged. He brushed hair out of my eyes, and the sweet gesture made me smile. “But the way you talk, your regrets, I think if you could go back and do it again, you would make changes to become a better person.”

  I thought about his words. He was right. I would have declined the offer to help Mitchell and Courtney rob the banks. I would have tried to talk them out of it, even. We could be happy in Minneapolis, and save up money slowly, the way everybody else did, and move to California when we had enough.

  I would have tried to repair the bond with my family, or, at least, my sisters. My bond with my parents may have been too broken to repair. But perhaps I could still be a big sister, the proper type of big sister I would have wanted to have.

  I’d never been a charitable person; I’d never really thought about it. I didn’t have the money to donate very much. What I’d had was time, and I’d spent it selfishly, lounging around. I could have used that time to volunteer. I could have helped at a women’s shelter or organized protests against injustice. I could have used that time to help people who hadn’t grown up in a middle-class, white, privileged lifestyle.

  I could have been helping somewhere for people like Parker’s family, so they wouldn’t be forced to choose between taking on three jobs or making a deal with a demon. That was a choice no one should ever have to make, and the fact that Parker had been put in that situation made me furious.

  “If you could go back to Earth, what would you change?” I asked him.

  He sighed, still running his fingers through my hair. I savored the sensation. “I worked hard my entire life,” he said. “I worked so, so hard to make sure my siblings were safe and provided for. But I didn’t get to spend much time with them in my later years, especially after my parents first passed away. I was working three jobs, and they needed me there. They needed me to comfort them, care for them, and instead I was working.”