Purgatorium

by J. H. Carnathan

  My watch reads 25:05.

  I see my arms are tied to the arms of a chair. I try to move my legs, but they are tied too. I shake as I look around the freezing room. The walls are a metallic light blue color and there’s a metal door in front of me. Frost and condensation cover everything. To my right there are dozens of empty meat hooks.

  A meat locker? I think, despairingly. Who put me here? What in the world is going on? I begin to panic. I also feel something on the left side of my face. I look over at it, trying to focus. With blood on the inside. My blood?

  Looking back at my wrist, I panic even more: 25:25.

  Wait! I’m not where I need to be. Those horrible dark skeletal creatures are going to be coming for me! I think as I struggle to free my legs and arms. Suddenly, I feel the slap of a hand on my right cheek. Surprisingly, I feel no pain, just shock. I look up, angry to see Michael standing in front of me.

  “That’s what you get for almost getting us reaped. You better be glad I got you out on time before the tree could spit you out from only God knows where!” Michael slaps me again, just a little bit harder this time to where I can almost feel it.

  “Was that fun?” Michael asks, smiling. I want to scream at him, but I can’t make my mouth move. No sound comes out. Michael takes out his playing card from his vest pocket and wipes the blood around my face.

  “Let’s get back on track again, shall we? Now where were we?” Michael takes out the book he had shown me this morning. “I would have gotten you out sooner but I had to go back for this, baby.”

  He shows me a picture of my office window, making me assume that he has lost his mind. I look down at my watch again, my panic building.

  “Don’t worry, they can’t sense you when your body drops below a certain temperature, which is all a part of the next chapter. You see Reapers have those heat sensor eyes, all predator-like. We will be safe in here for the time being. Which has somehow happened before. Don’t ask me how. But anyways, reapers may act dumb but there is a brain in that skull of theirs. No matter how small it may be.”

  I watch Michael get a chair and scoot it over to me.

  “I know what you are about to think, so don’t bother thinking it. Cheating for money at a card game was not the pain I was referring too. The mental pain aspect comes from your sins. All humans have a certain amount of sins bounded to their soul. It takes a lot of self-knowledge to find those sins that are bounded to you, because a sin is just another name for demon. It gets in real deep-like and doesn’t ever want to let go. Let’s take the coffee shop memory for example. Didn’t you wonder where that soft prideful voice came from? Telling your young self what to say and do? That was your demon speaking to you.”

  That was my demon? I continue to think. It sounded so…human.”

  Michael walks around me in circles as if he were hearing my thoughts. “The only reason you can hear it now is because you are through the looking glass. You are looking out at yourself on the other side just like what your demon has always done. The alive past version of you just thinks that what he is actually thinking is his own thoughts. But really it’s his demons. It’s the devil’s way of inflicting mental chaos unto the world.”

  I am in control of my own thoughts. I decide on what I say and what I do!

  I begin trying to move my way out of the chair. Michael appears in front of my face and says, “Humans can’t say that they are pure, because they are not. There are sins that everyone faces in their life: Gluttony, pride, envy, lust, wrath, sloth, and greed. Can you find which one is bound to your soul?”

  I look away from him and think, I can’t be a sinner. I don’t know anything about me. So I cheated at a card game. Whoopee! Devil come take my sinful soul now! I think sarcastically to myself.

  Michael then whispers in my ear, “Have you ever wondered what happens when you leave the sink on in this place?”

  Michael kicks away his chair and swiftly shoves my face up against the sink, hanging on the wall beside me. He yells, “You think this is a game?!” I am stunned, not understanding what is happening. Michael turns on the faucet.

  A loud noise is heard coming through the pipes, making its way up to the nose of the faucet. Michael plugs the drain and I watch as brown puss comes flowing out.

  What is that?! I think, disgusted.

  “This is punishment.”

  The brown chunky liquid fills up the sink while Michael holds on to my head and forces me to the brim.

  “By you going into that tree, you compromised everything that we have worked so hard at perfecting! There are no more redoes or restarts for you anymore! After this week, your heart will flatline.”

  I stare at the brown chewy liquid, afraid of it, my sin, and of dying.

  “This, my soul brother, is a metaphor of your whole existence. Wanting to be pure, but your sinful nature always leaving you dark and chunky. If you could smell this you would know it smelled like a mix between Uriel’s feet and Raphael’s farts. That’s right, angels fart. It’s a blessing and a curse. Blessed to God that you can’t smell them. It’s stanky. I mean real talk stank-ey. Try and smell it.”

  Michael dunks my head into the pool of brown infested liquid. I take in all the chunky fluid as it enters my mouth, then lift my head back up.

  “Are you angry yet?!” Michael dunks me again. I bring my head back up as he wipes away the brown vomit from my face.

  “That’s good. Keep bottling up that anger,” he says, putting some kind of mask on my face. Michael wipes his hands with some paper towels.

  He chuckles and reaches down, touching the mask as it sits askew on the side of my face. “Now where was I? Ah yes! Once you figure out your sin, you will have to face it, if you ever want to leave this place.”

  He moves his finger around the mask, following its contours. “This mask is like that demonic tree outside. It represents a symbol of a locked cage in which you force to hold all your feelings and emotions in. The reapers may have erased your memories and forced your emotions deep down inside you, but they are still in there. You just need to be like a volcano and rupture them out.”

  He brings the chair back up and scoots it over to me. Sitting down, he shows me a mirror and holds it close to my face. I am surprised to see the mask being the one I had on in the casino room, the Jack of hearts mask.

  “A Jack of all trades,” he says to me, smashing the mirror to the wall.

  “You know the meaning of the word ‘cold’? Lacking in affection, enthusiasm, and warmth. Kind of depressing in a way, don’t you think?”

  It dawns on me in that moment how right he is. The cold brings with it a new sense of touch and feeling throughout my body. It almost makes me feel alive again and yet, after a few seconds, pain follows. How can something so freeing also be so deadly at the same time?

  Michael waits till I stop thinking before he continues. “It is the one thing you actually can feel less numb towards in this place. It’s kind of ironic, if you ask me, since freezing weather usually gets humans numb. God has a weird sense of humor.”

  Michael walks to the side of the room and picks up a baton hanging on the wall. He walks back to me, looks up at my face, and smiles. Not the baton, I think.

  “As you already know, you’re invincible to a point. Only when your soul is below freezing can it get hurt. You remember my good friend, blackjack?” He winds up. I try to move to protect myself from the baton, but cannot. Michael slams the blackjack into my shoulder, my legs, and then across my abdomen.

  I feel every hit as if my body is no longer numb to everything anymore. All it took was for my body to get to below freezing to actually feel something. How ironic, I think.

  “Are you getting angry yet?!” Michael screams as I continue to think, I should be mad but it kind of feels good to actually feel something again. Even though it hurts.

  Michael stops and looks at t
he bloody baton. “‘A man is bound to make for himself in this world that fortune which heaven had refused him at his birth.’ Alexandre Dumas was probably the best writer who ever lived. Why? He believed in second chances. The Three Musketeers…The Count of Monte Cristo…The Man in the Iron Mask. He was a black man trying to believe in a better future than what was happening at that time. Even through all the chaos and pain around him, he found hope.” He looks back at me. “Hope is the soul ingredient to what you need to survive.”

  I see blood on my face, feel it dripping off the end of my nose. It’s wet on my lips and yet just like the cold, I feel alive again. I forgot what this feeling felt like.

  Michael pushes a huge block of ice from the side of the room towards me. He takes the baton and begins swinging it up against the ice, breaking bits and pieces off of it.

  “What is it like not to feel, speak, touch, taste…love? That was always what you hated most about this place—how your body is always numb. Well at least until you get cold. As you can see, hurting you physically outside the cold doesn’t do much damage, but when your nose hairs begin to ice over, that’s when you begin to feel everything. Once you step out of this meat locker you will go right back to feeling numb again. You used to spend a lot of time in here as well as inside your refrigerator.”

  Michael laughs and then, after a few seconds, gets all of a sudden serious. “I never knew at the time if you were just training your body or you just wanted to feel something.”

  He stops hitting the block, takes out his knife, and begins chiseling away at it, almost as if he were ice sculpting something. Michael then turns and walks to the left corner of the room where a thermostat hangs halfway up the wall. He turns down the temperature five degrees more. “To help you decide, you must find your purpose. But will touch up on that in Chapter 3. You need to continue to learn how to survive through the pain first. Which brings us now to Chapter 2 of the reaper studies: The full six cycles of glaciation. We are already experiencing the first phase as we speak.”

  Michael breathes out cold air and points at it. “Once you see your breath, a reaper is not too far away from you.” He then takes his knife and starts stabbing the ice piece.

  I begin to sense the temperature dropping and start shivering more violently.

  “You are going through phase two right about now,” he says, still chiseling away at his ice block.

  He stops stabbing at it and goes back to structuring it.

  “There will come a time when you are faced with a whole group of these reapers. And the more reapers there are, the colder it will get. Your body’s core temperature in this world is a lot higher due to your outer and inner layer consisting mainly of your soul. While your soul does give off more heat, remember it can only handle so much. Here are the phases you need to watch out for when you are faced with a reaper.”

  Michael stops what he is doing and brushes the ice flakes off his poncho. Next he takes out a marker and writes on the wall in front of me:

  1. Cold breath4. Frost bite

  2. The shivers5. Brain freeze

  3. Snow falling6. Hypothermia

  I look at each of the steps and feel I am going through the second phase as we speak.

  Michael comes over and looks into my eyes. It seems as if he is searching for something. He stops and goes back to his ice piece, forming the structure faster now.

  I feel like my whole body has been dumped into a frozen lake. I watch as he again stabs his ice block. His speed has picked up, ice carvings shoot up in the air and surround me like falling snow.

  “Phase three, just as you probably know already, is when you start to see snow, sprinkling from outside. That means a reaper is at least 10 feet from you. Why does that happen, you say? Well the theory is they come from the sky. So when they dive down, the climate changes to a deathly cold. If you ever get a chance in that moment, look up, the clouds have even been completely frozen over.”

  I feel as if my legs are now being iced over.

  “Looks like now you are going through what we like to call frostbite but with a twist. To understand more clearly, there are originally four degrees of frostbite. Though in this world, the side effects of each degree are different due to the body temperature being different. The first degree in which you are experiencing at this very moment, affects your outer layer, causing pain and frost nip. Originally, by the end of this phase, it would leave you feeling numb. However, since you naturally feel numb on a day to day basis, that would bring no extra pain for you. So they replaced your numbness with more pain flowing to your inner layer. Which brings us to our second degree. This is something quite special since no human has ever felt their insides freeze over before. The third degree is when a certain part from your inner layer—let’s say your leg—has completely been frozen over. Your muscles, tendons, blood vessels, and nerves all freeze. In turn, this makes your outer layer—the leg—start to freeze over and harden. And I mean literally freeze over. Think of your leg as an ice sculpture if you will.”

  He turns and unveils his creation towards me. “Ta-da!” It appears to look like an ice sculpture of a leg. “With pain comes inspiration. From inspiration brings art!” he yells, rejoicing at his work.

  “Lastly, the fourth degree is when any amount of pressure is put on said outer layer, it will crack…” He takes his knife and pokes the ice sculpture. It cracks instantly. “And ultimately shatter.”

  The whole structure breaks away, leaving me wanting to get out of here this instant.

  “Don’t worry, this freezing compartment isn’t cold enough to get you to phase four. But if you thought that was bad, phase five is the brain freeze. The name in itself should let you know the pain behind its story. Just think of a brain freeze that never stops is the best way to put it. Too bad we don’t have a slurpee machine to really test it out on ya. I guess you will just have to learn that the hard way. Moving on!”

  He takes out his camera and takes a picture of me. “This is priceless.” He looks at the photo and says, “Hopefully a week from now we can learn to laugh at all this.” He puts the Polaroid in his pocket with glee.

  “And finally, once you reach phase six, your body will stop shivering, you will suffer mental confusion, followed by the feeling of your heart stopping. Soon after, you black out. Keep in mind you cannot die in this place, but once you get to phase six, then you give the reapers a much easier target if you are in their cross hairs, you feel me?”

  He looks at me, knowing I can’t move or speak, and waits a few seconds before he continues.

  “Put this in your head. The full six cycles of glaciation ONLY apply to either on how long you are confronted by a reaper and the reaper’s ratio amount.

  He looks back over to me, waiting for me to do something, as if it’s one big sadistic game he is trying to play towards me.

  “But it isn’t all bad. There is one good thing that comes out of this. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Since reapers can read your soul’s heat temperature, then once you get your body into a much colder climate, like this one, your soul’s temperature drops, making it harder for them to detect you. You would become more of a blip on their radar so to speak. Let me ask you something. Out of all the time we have spent here already, have you seen me once shiver?”

  I look back and don’t ever remember him shivering. I just assumed it was because he is an angel. Didn’t really think angels got cold or hot. Though not until a few days ago did I even think they were really real. Half of me still can’t believe it.

  “It’s not different because I am angel. Same rules apply to all of us in here. Each time you start to breathe in the cold, your body rapidity grows a bit more accustomed to it.

  The atmosphere around me does feel almost normal to me now, I think.

  I continue to shiver, knowing that it wouldn’t be that easy to get used to this feelin
g in a matter of minutes.

  “End of Chapter 2,” Michael says, cleaning off his blade. “Just so we are on the same page, you should know now how to stop them and how they can stop you. Same page?”

  I sit in silence as he walks over and nods my head for me.

  “Glad to hear,” he says in a sarcastic voice.

  “Finally, we can get on to Chapter 3, finding your purpose.” He scrapes his knife on the edge of a small ice block that he just picked up. “The only way to find your purpose is understanding what sixty means to you.”

  I don’t want to listen to anymore. I begin rocking the chair, trying to undo myself from the tightening rope around me.

  “I bet you are asking yourself, ‘What is this all for? Why is this happening to me?’ And my personal favorite, ‘Why does God want to hurt me?’”

  I nod my head, giving him the kind of communication he has been wanting out of me.

  “It’s good to see that you have been listening. Well the answers are simple. This place is like God giving you a lifeline. You could be dead right now, think about that for a moment. You think this place is bad, just wait until you see hell! This place would only be the opening act to that circus show. I know you are confused, scared, and hurting right now. You may not be able to fully understand just yet but knowing that hurt, that pain, isn’t what you think you want, will turn out to be what you really need to move on. That’s the path to redemption. The thin line between need and want is where you are at right now. Do you need a second chance? Or do you want a second chance? That is the question that I am going to need answered by you when this day is over.

  I begin rocking the chair, trying to undo myself from the tightening rope around me.

  Without looking at me, he says, “Why sixty?”

  “Do you think you chose the cold to be the specific thing that brings you pain in this place? Maybe what cold is to you is time—the time that you took for granted on the things that should have meant the most to you. For your own deceitful bones have left you. A frigid sword’s edge comes forth to proclaim the rest of your dying soul.”