Just to See Hell

by Chandler Morrison

  From the right wing of the brightly candlelit stage emerges a bearded Arabic man on all fours, bloodied, beaten, and weeping, garbed only in a filthy white turban and a scant loincloth. In tow is an altar boy of about twelve or fourteen with a nine-tailed whip in a hand that keeps lashing forward, bringing the whip’s ragged ends down upon the crawling man’s bleeding back, urging him forward. The boy’s face is stoic and without expression.

  “Witness, all of ye, the heretic brought forth,” proclaims the priest. “He has spaketh against the Lord our God within his unholy place of worship, and he is of a faith that wrongfully asserts that Jesus Christ is neither the Messiah nor the son of God.”

  “May his words forever scald his wicked tongue.”

  Blood trickles from the wounds on the Arabic man’s bare back and splashes silently to the smooth wooden floor. The altar boy continues his lashings and now begins to kick him violently in the ribs, pointing and directing him towards the huge cross.

  Two more altar boys emerge from the other side of the stage, one of them pushing a tall steel stepladder, the other carrying a wooden hammer and a handful of rusty nine-inch nails.

  “This man shall be made to suffer as our Lord Jesus suffered, and through this suffering and the holy blessing provided by my earthly powers, he shall become Christ upon the Cross, a victim one and the same, and he shall give up his body and pour out his blood for the forgiveness of our sins.”

  “Praise be to you, O Lord, for you forgive our unforgivable sins, and we are not worthy.”

  Now a procession of twelve teenage girls, all of them blonde, strikingly beautiful, and allegedly virginal, come filing out from the left side of the stage. Each of them carries a tall white candle, and they assemble in a semicircle behind the cross and begin to sing Hebrew hymns in soft elegant voices, kind faces upturned as if the Heavens themselves were just above, waiting in the rafters.

  And from these dark rafters above the cross, two loops of thick black rope descend, knocking some of the paper doves on their way down and causing them to spin and swing on their unseen strings. These ropes are attached to a pulley backstage, currently being operated by the two inebriated altar boys.

  The boy leading the Arab tosses aside his whip and produces from the pocket of his robes a short-bladed knife and a crude crown fashioned of barbed wire and razor blades. With the knife he saws through the Arab’s turban, taking no mind of the lacerations he causes as the wrappings fall away, and then he forces the torturous crown down upon the man’s already-bleeding head.

  The boy who’d been pushing the ladder now comes forth and slides the Arab’s arms into the two loops of rope. Once the man is securely fastened into the makeshift harness, the boy gives a tug on the one of the ropes to signal to the pulley-operators, and the Arab slowly begins to ascend into the air, stopping once he is positioned rightly before the cross.

  Stoic as the others, the boy with the hammer and nails stolidly climbs up the stepladder. Once he reaches the top, the Arab, whose vision is blinded by the blood seeping into his swollen eyes, lifts his head and points his face in the boy’s general direction. He whispers something unintelligible, probably a plea for mercy, but the boy tunes it out. He has heard all of it before, every Sunday, in all different languages. He is unbothered, unhearing. He selects the first nail, holding the rest of them between his teeth, and begins his work.

  The hammer-blows echo throughout the cathedral, pointedly resolute in their resounding thunder.

  The Godfucker’s eyes are open.

  Gladys usually closes her eyes during the actual crucifixion, not out of revulsion, but simply so she can envision herself at the site of the Crucifixion. Today, however, she is watching the ceremony with eager attentiveness.

  She is particularly pleased with this week’s sacrifice; last week’s had been disappointing…a mottled, Satan-worshipping young junkie who had seemed too strung out to care about what was happening to him. It had been a lackluster mass, and she’d left with a bad taste in her mouth.

  This week, though, is different. She does not consider herself racist by any means whatsoever, but she knows about those dirty Muslims, and she knows that they all need to be put to death. Filthy, stinking animals they are…of this she is certain because she’s seen it on the Television, how they blow themselves up and beat their numerous wives and eat their own feces. She read somewhere that their preferred method of copulation is anal sodomy, the thought of which makes Gladys sick to her stomach. Her blue-haired bingo-buddy also informed her that they achieve erotic stimulation through the act of urinating and defecating on each other, and that it has been scientifically proven that they descended from prehistoric tapeworms.

  So yes, she thinks Father Benway did a fine job of selecting the sacrifice this week.

  Gladys’s smile continues to widen in appropriation with the Arab’s loudening screams.

  * * *

  Jezebel is only paying partial attention to the ceremony. At the moment, she’s eyeing the altar boy who is pounding the nails into the Eucharist, wondering how much money she could squeeze out of him. He looks to be about fourteen or fifteen, and with the right approach, she supposes she could get him to raid Daddy’s wallet or Mommy’s purse without much reservation.

  She has no qualms or reservations about engaging such young clients; they’re easy targets and the duration of their stamina is significantly less than their older counterparts, so she can be done with them quickly. She charges not per hour but instead per ejaculation, which works out quite nicely with the young ones because some of them are done as soon as she takes off her top.

  Her ruminations are interrupted when an infant a few rows ahead of her begins to wail. She clenches her fists and bites the inside of her cheek…the only thing she hates more than a baby is a crying baby, and she believes that severe corporal punishment should be issued when an infant cries in public…to both the mother and the child. She herself has had eleven abortions, thankfully always before the little brat inside her has time to affect her figure.

  Granted, she is aware that her frequent trips to the abortion clinic (she even has a discount card that gets her half price on every third terminated pregnancy) would be frowned upon by the Catholic community, but she justifies it with the contention that in the end she’s doing society a favor. The media keeps talking about the increasingly problematic population growth, so Jezebel’s theory is this: The world can’t afford it, so just fucking abort it. She’d had that put on a bumper sticker a few years back and slapped it on her little red Honda Accord, but after she got her tires slashed for the fourth time, she begrudgingly covered it up with one that simply says “God Bless America.”

  Alas, the woman with the shrieking baby chose not to abide by Jezebel’s words of wisdom, so the piercing cries carry on. It’s okay, though, because now the Arab’s screams are increasing in volume as the altar boy pounds nails into his feet, and this drowns out the unhappy infant. This is good. Jezebel would take a screaming crucified Arab over a crying baby any day of the week.

  Especially Sunday.

  Little Noah is fidgeting.

  He hates sitting still for long periods of time, and hates even more sitting still for things that bore him, such as Sunday mass. He looks over at his mother, who is watching the action on stage with a distracted kind of half-interest…unbeknownst to him, she is thinking about what she needs to get at the grocery store later, as well as debating on whether or not she’s going to let her slob of a husband fuck her tonight.

  To Noah’s right is a frail old man, his eyes shut and his chin resting on his chest, soft snores emitting from his enormous nose. There are tufts of white hair growing out of his ears, and this bothers Noah, so he turns around to look at the black family behind him. All of them are completely absorbed in the crucifixion, save for a young girl about Noah’s age. This girl is the only member of the family who notices Noah’s staring observation of them, and she returns his gaze with a blank stare of her own. She has
tangled, knotted pigtails on either side of her head, and the whites of her eyes have a somewhat yellow glaze over them. Noah is suddenly terrified of this girl, though he doesn’t know why, so he quickly turns back around to face forward.

  For several achingly long minutes, he tries to pay attention to what’s happening on the stage, but this proves to be unbearably boring; the Arab’s suffering means nothing to him…he sees far more interesting acts of extreme violence on his favorite Saturday morning cartoons. Yesterday he laughed hysterically as Mickey Mouse tore open Minnie Mouse’s red and white polka-dotted dress and then proceeded to savagely rape her before bashing her face into a bloody pink mess with a wooden mallet much like the one being used to pound nails into the man up on the cross right now. An unfamiliar phenomenon had occurred then, too, when Noah’s tiny penis began to stiffen as he watched the carnal savagery unfold on the glowing screen. This had confused him, because never before had he experienced this peculiar hardening and enlargement in his beloved genital area, but it had not been unpleasant, so he just kept watching the program, albeit with significantly increased interest.

  This, however, fails to captivate Noah. It’s the same thing every week…some guy or gal getting whipped and beaten and nailed to the cross and whatnot…the unchanging repetition of it annoys Noah. He’d love to see some chainsaws or bazookas get thrown into the mix, or perhaps see Daffy Duck come prancing onto the stage wielding his signature meat cleaver and power drill.

  Of course, none of these things can be expected to occur, so Noah resorts to chewing on the cover of the hymnal, simply because this seems like the only thing to do at the moment.

  With the bleeding, weeping Arab now effectively nailed in place, the choir of girls, still singing, always singing, comes to stand at the front of the stage, six on either side of the pulpit, their candles continuing to flicker and burn, casting a haunting glow upon their ghostly faces.

  Father Benway steps down from the podium and strides elegantly over to the cross, standing before it and looking up at the man upon it. He raises both hands, palms facing the Arab, and says, “With my blessing and the earthly powers vested in me, you shall become Jesus incarnated upon the Cross, in mimicry of the torture inflicted upon Him. Your body and blood is now forfeit for the forgiveness of our sins, and I anoint you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  “Amen,” the audience says.

  More altar boys are marching onto the stage, two of them stumbling a little, all carrying a shining silver platter in one hand and a long serrated knife in the other. The first boy in line ascends the ladder and, without any hesitation, begins cutting small slices of flesh from the Arab’s torso and placing them neatly on the platter. Once his plate is full, he climbs back down, drops his knife at the foot of the cross, and then goes to stand behind the line of singing girls while another boy repeats this process.

  Once all of the altar boys have filled their respective platters with little slabs of bloody flesh, one last boy emerges from behind the curtains, carrying a huge silver pitcher and a long curved knife. He is young and timid and small, the very boy who’d been Father Benway’s bedchamber company this morning. He walks oddly, looking almost as if the movement is causing him pain.

  He ascends the ladder, pausing at the top to look with wide eyes at the man before him; he is no longer screaming or crying, but is instead just breathing raggedly, head lolled to one side, blood seeping and squirting from the hundreds of wounds on his body. There are flecks of spittle and gore in his dense beard, and thick strings of bloody snot are dripping from his wide nostrils. He does not so much as look at the boy.

  “This is my first time doing this,” whispers the boy meekly. “They tell me this is what God wants, but I’m not so sure. If it isn’t, please ask Him to forgive me.” At this last, after one final moment of hesitation, he slashes the Arab’s throat.

  The blood shoots out in rivers and freshets, and the boy hurriedly holds the pitcher beneath the man’s neck until it is full. Then, glancing once more at the choking, sputtering man dying upon the cross, he carefully walks back down the ladder and goes to join the other boys.

  They break off into two groups, walking single-file to either side of the stage, descending the steps onto the floor, and then coming to stand in line before the rows upon rows of filled pews, a few yards away from the end of the long purple rug down the center. The boy with the pitcher of blood stands front and center, willing his hands to stop shaking. It would not do to drop the blood of Christ. It would not do at all.

  From his place above, the priest gestures with both hands to the boys holding the platters and says to his flock, “And so Jesus said, ‘Take this, all of you, and eat it, for this is my body which will be given up for you.’” He then gestures to the boy with the pitcher and continues, “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.’”

  The people come, row by row, starting at the front and moving back. Each person takes a slab of dark flesh from one of the platters and places it in his or her mouth, chewing absently as one would chew any other source of ordinary nourishment, and then washing it down with a small sip of blood from the pitcher before returning to his or her seat to commence post-communion prayer. It is a long process, usually taking upwards of half an hour for everyone to receive communion, but wondrously, there is never a shortage of flesh or blood. It is generally accepted that this is due to careful calculations of the church’s maximum capacity, requiring each of the boys to cut an exact amount of meat slivers to ensure that all the churchgoers are fed, and that the size of the pitcher is designed in accordance with the church’s capacity, as well. Others, though, insist that it is only through the Lord’s magic that no churchgoer is ever denied communion due to a lack of sufficient resources.

  With the Eucharist distributed and the sacrifice hanging still and dead upon the bloodstained cross, the mass is all but concluded. The choir girls are the first to exit, singing, of course, “Ave Maria” as they leave the stage. Then go the altar boys, silent and stern-faced, their bloodstained plates balanced in their palms.

  Standing at his pulpit, the early symptoms of a coke crash beginning to set in, the sweating priest addresses his crowd. “Go now, and may the Lord be with you in all things. Sin if it is necessary, so long as you are committed to return here next Sunday to have any such sins absolved. Let us now lastly proclaim the order of our three priorities.”

  “First our church, then our God, then our useless and wretched lives.”

  “Amen, you are dismissed.”

  Upon this dismissal, the church erupts into a chorus of chatter as the churchgoers begin to file out towards the exit, milling slowly like cattle, talking and gossiping and laughing. The man on the cross is forgotten as soon as their backs are turned against him, and all are relieved to be released into another week of sinful debauchery that they know will be forgiven with next week’s deposit of penance.

  The curtains close.

  Exeunt, and amen.

  Coming Down

  The town of Millhaven lies to the east of and adjacent to its neighboring cities Villa Vista and Villa Vida, the former mainly being a bustling shopping district brimming with strip malls and superstores, and the latter entirely being a socialite cesspool of suburban corruption. The Villas are both known for their concentration of uppity yuppie communities and snobbish decadence, whereas Millhaven is of decidedly less repute and esteem than its sister cities; the buildings are older, the denizens poorer, the neighborhoods seedier and the scenery blander. While by no means a ghetto or slum, it is by and large the ugly duckling of Mudhoney County, made even more so by its unfortunately close proximity to the much more opulent Villas.

  Millhaven’s only feature of any real note (one prided by the locals but looked down upon by those hailing from other parts of the c
ounty, the Villas in particular) is Jubilee Street, a long, dimly-lit stretch of road cratered by potholes and crammed with dive bars, shady nightclubs, head shops, pawn shops, chop shops, and cheap strip joints. A jagged scar slicing through the center of what is otherwise a decent-enough small town of dully ordinary plainness, Jubilee Street is regarded as a kind of Sodom and Gomorra of Mudhoney, a place to which outwardly-upstanding churchgoers and restless husbands in the throes of midlife crises secretly flock for their required doses of neon-lit sin and drunken debauchery.

  Perched atop a high hill overlooking Jubilee Street like a disapproving parent is the Church of the Holy Redeemer, a small white chapel dating back to the mid-nineteenth century with a vast but poorly-tended cemetery directly behind it. Otherwise indiscriminate, it was at this very hilltop cemetery, on a Saturday in 2057, that the risen Jesus Christ made his (no capital H, for reasons later to be divulged) first appearance.

  It was a grim morning, with low-hanging charcoal clouds coughing out great windy torrents of chilly gray rain. Larry Lazlo, aged twenty-four at the time of his recent heroin-induced demise, lay enclosed within a glossy cedar casket, rainwater sliding off its sides as it was lowered into the newly-dug grave encircled by black-clad mourners standing soberly beneath their dripping umbrellas. The parents of the deceased wept silent tears as the priest spoke stoically of ashes and dust. If anyone noticed the out-of-place stranger, tall and pale and stern-faced with feet attired in cowboy boots the color of burnt brimstone, they made no mention of it.

  They did, however, notice the man who was slowly ascending the hill, garbed lavishly in flowing white robes and sporting long, wavy brown hair and a thick red beard offset by soft, pale-blue eyes. There were large, badly-healed holes in his palms and feet. He carried no umbrella and was thus soaked to the bone, but he showed no apparent qualm with this.