by James Wymore
“We need to go back!” one boy shouted at me.
I was enjoying myself already. I didn’t want to be distracted. “Why?”
“We have to keep them out now, or they’ll just come take it back.”
I nodded as I turned to follow him back out.
This time my team formed a wall. Kim and her boyfriend were right in the middle. I flew up, laced my arm through my harp so it hung at my elbow, and grabbed the arm of the boy who had brought me back out. I latched my feet under the armpits below me, thinking I was glad to be on the top, as that looked uncomfortable for the one beneath.
As we waited, I looked at the boy next to me. He had a gray smock, almost like medical scrubs.
“My name’s Jennifer,” I said.
He smiled. “I’m Juan.”
We turned to face our incoming enemies.
The other team formed up and rammed us. They impacted Kim at full power, but she didn’t break. Juan gritted his teeth and held my arm so tight I thought it would collapse into a strand of rope. They tried again and again to break us, but we never came apart.
Many of our group shouted insults at them when they bounced away. I noticed Juan didn’t. I thought that showed good character.
By sunrise, the battle was over.
Kim hugged everybody and we all congratulated each other.
When she started making out with her boyfriend, I asked Juan, “So what’s in all those rooms?”
He smiled and waved for me to follow him. As we flew through the door he said, “The biggest room is full of scrolls. There’s a pool of water in one. We think it’s like a baptistery, but nobody is really sure how to use it, since we kind of float. There aren’t any priests around anyway.”
I found that I liked him. I could see beyond his child-like face and detect a kind soul. I liked how softly he held my hand. I knew he had a strong grip, but he didn’t use it on me now. The rising sun illuminated the colorful windows, sending a rainbow through the big hall. Just like the murals, the windows were all pictures of cute little cherubs. I wanted to smash them with a rock, but I kept that urge to myself.
“There’s a room over here with tiered seating. It works well for choirs and music. The last room is just storage shelves and cupboards. We think it was probably full of supplies at one time, but nobody puts their stuff on them now because they don’t know who will be in charge of this place from day to day.”
The last room we looked in was the biggest. Rolled up scraps of paper lined all the walls and spilled out onto several tables. Juan had a strap on his little lute, so he put it over his shoulder and picked up one of the scrolls.
“Some of them are like the Bible, but only the Old Testament, and not exactly the same. A surprising number of them talk about somebody named ‘Zoroaster.’ There are some that make no sense at all.”
I decided to trust Juan. “The demon told me I was here to learn something.”
“They all told us all that,” Juan said. He had a flat expression, showing no anger as he said it.
“You’ve read all of these?”
“Many times.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know. A few of the others count time by watching the sun and moon and seasons, but it doesn’t seem to have any meaning. I stopped caring after a few hundred years.”
My mind reeled. I felt a tear break free. Juan put his arms out and I leaned into him. He just held me.
“You’re different than the others,” he said.
“How?” I wiped my cheek and stared into his deep brown eyes. I did not see a child now. His eyes were the eyes of a man.
“You don’t accept things,” he said. “I like that. It makes me want to try again.”
“Try?”
“Try and learn whatever it is we’re all supposed to learn. Try and get out of here. It’s been a long time since I gave up on trying.”
“There’s a way out?”
“It seems to say so in these scrolls. Of course, there’s a lot of debate about if these scrolls are even true. We don’t know who wrote them or when. But most people agree they seem to say that this Hell is a temporary condition and if we change or figure something out we can leave and go to a paradise beyond our imagining.”
“I thought this place would be paradise.” I pulled back and picked up one of the scrolls. It talked about Noah. I chose one off the shelf at random. It had math on it and talked about angels being buoyantly neutral. I set it down. “Have you ever known anybody who figured it out and left?”
“Me, personally, no. There are rumors, naturally. I spent decades chasing them down. The best I can tell, nobody has ever seen anybody leave. It’s hard to say for sure, though, because most of the angels change alliances so often. Friends come and go. People become despondent and spend decades out on their own. There’s one guy I’ve been looking for a long time. If he figured it out, he did it on his own and nobody saw him leave.”
Despite his faith, I felt the fight going out of me. How could I succeed where so many had failed? “Do you think people have to be on their own to find the answer?”
“I doubt it. Maybe. Who knows?”
I didn’t care right then. I couldn’t handle being on my own after everything that happened. I needed to be with people. I wanted to be with Juan. “Do you think I should read all of these?”
He patted my shoulder. “Maybe you’ll see what we all missed.”
sat in a folding chair in an office with sterile white walls and ugly orange carpet. Four boys my age, about ten or eleven years old, sat in chairs on either side of me arranged in a semi-circle. I was the only girl. We were dressed in white jumpsuits, barefoot. The carpet was rough to my toes and the balls of my feet. The room smelled like someone had stuffed an old tuna sandwich into a vent for several hundred years. It punched the pit of my stomach and brought bile to the back of my throat.
A demon paced in front of us. She was short for an adult, shorter than the tallest boy in the room who sat two chairs away on my right. Graceful black horns curled out of the blacker ringlets of her hair. Her humanoid face was round and taut, and her skin glistened red and silver like she was made of liquid iron. A long black robe draped from one shoulder, wrapped about her stout body, and fell just below her backward-hinged knees. The demon’s legs were sturdy and goat-like, covered in coarse hair with a fiery sheen. In some ways, she resembled the old, handsome Spanish caricatures of El Diablo from Abuela Carmen’s vintage book of folk stories.
Her golden eyes bore catlike pupils and a stern pinch at the corners as she perused what appeared to be a stone tablet illuminated with strange characters. The characters scrolled and changed like text on a digital screen. We sat in silence, save for the subtle clopping of her hooves against the floor as she paced back and forth. One boy on the end of the row to my left couldn’t contain himself any longer and began to sob.
“Are we dead?”
All heads turned to look at the skinny boy just right of me with a coffee-brown complexion. His eyes gleamed with equal parts wonder and dread. We each felt the same, I knew.
The goat lady did not look up from her tablet. Her words bore a thick Spanish accent. “Did I say you could speak?”
“No.”
“Don’t waste our time with absurd questions, then. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
The tall boy in the next seat asked, “Where are we?”
A third boy with light skin and mousy brown hair sitting to my left asked simultaneously, “Who are you?”
The goat lady looked up from her tablet and cast an indifferent glance around the circle at us. She drew in a stiff breath, flared her nostrils, and pronounced, “I am Betlize, juvenile handler and underling to Xandern, fellow Yazata of the great Ahura Mazda. You are dead. We are in Hell. Congratulations on failing to survive to adulthood.”
“Why are we in Hell?” A slight quiver in the skinny boy’s voice betrayed the diminishing wall of self-assurance holdin
g back his emotions.
“I want my mother!” The boy on the far left bawled so hard he slid out of his chair and hugged his knees to his chest. The boy with light skin squeezed his shoulder and urged him to get a grip.
“There are no mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers in Hell,” said Betlize. “All the family ties from your former lives have been dissolved.”
“But my brother…” I began.
“What does dissolved mean?” asked the skinny boy.
Betlize snapped her fingers. The sobbing boy went silent. He swiped at his mouth and throat with wide eyes as though his ability to produce sound had magically vanished.
“The next child who interrupts me will have their tongue bound for the remainder of this orientation. Is that clear?”
I shut my mouth and nodded with the rest.
“Unfortunately for all of you, when you did have parents, they didn’t teach you to follow the ways of Lord Mazda.”
“Who…?” The skinny boy froze, mouth drawn in an “o,” trying to look as though he meant only to blow out a breath.
The goat lady eyed him for a long moment, then continued, “Ahura Mazda is Lord and God of all creation. Until you know His ways, you cannot be permitted into His glory. Not even as children.”
“How…?” I bit my lip and glanced away, feeling the goat lady’s eyes on me like wood-burning lasers.
“It isn’t our fault our parents didn’t teach us,” said the tall boy in a soft tone of defiance. “They probably didn’t even know the truth. This isn’t—”
Betlize snapped her fingers. The boy swallowed. His fingers twitched and tears filled his eyes, but he resisted probing his muted throat.
“Not fair, is it? Well…” She glanced at her tablet and grunted as though disappointed. “Yes, Humberto Verde, I suppose you’re right. You were disciplined three times for bullying at school due to assumptions based on your size and not your actual behavior. Died during surgery to fix a leg shattered in an accident with a careless motorist. It appears you had a severe allergy to the anesthetic. I would say you have quite a lot of experience with unfairness. Patience will serve you well here.”
She scrolled up to the top of the glowing text and swiped right. She sighed as though bored or impatient. “I am obligated to inform you that your time in Hell will not last forever. Eventually, when your ignorance of Lord Mazda has been corrected and you have learned your lessons, you will each find your way into Paradise. Yea.”
The skinny boy raised his hand.
Betlize rolled her eyes at him. “What?”
“So, we’re not here because we’re bad?”
The demon raised an eyebrow and swiped her fingers across the tablet. “Breaking into an abandoned copper mine on a dare didn’t turn out to be such a good idea when the tunnel collapsed, did it, Roberto DeJolla?”
He fidgeted and cast his gaze at the carpet as though it were suddenly far more interesting than anything the goat lady had to say.
“You were rather mischievous it seems, but not cruel. I’ve dealt with children who have done far worse in their abnormally short lifespans than you.”
I didn’t appreciate the way Betlize spoke to us, like we were stupid because we had all died as kids. None of us wanted to be here. At least, I assumed not. And the only crime of which most of us seemed guilty was spiritual ignorance. Her strange beauty seemed sinister now that her authority over us had grown uncomfortable.
So many questions burned in my mind. Did unknowing infants have to work their way out of Hell somehow? Did bad children have to stay longer than good children? Would our family ties be restored when we got out of Hell? I kept these thoughts to myself. Betlize said she would explain everything, and I didn’t want to lose my voice.
The room remained silent as the goat lady resumed her pacing. Her eyes scanned the stone block in her hand once more, then she paused. “Justina Harper?” She glanced directly at me with her bright catlike eyes and no-nonsense expression.
I cringed back in my seat and forced myself to meet her gaze.
She looked at the tablet once more. “Had one sibling: a brother, age eight.”
Her mentioning my brother made me squirm with anticipation.
“Likes horses and plain chocolate ice cream,” she continued. “Prefers playing with action figures and collecting insects to Barbie dolls, and despises the color pink.” The demon looked at me and gestured to the boys. “Notice that you are the only young lady in this room today? Girls usually live longer than boys, so there are not as many of them in the younger groups.” She looked at the tablet once more, then dropped it to her goat-like thigh and put her left hand on her hip. She glanced at the other children as though revealing an absurd fact. “Ms. Harper attacked a bear, and it tore out her throat.”
Nervous snickers spilled out from the two boys who could still speak. It was as if I’d done something incredibly stupid and now paid the price. I cast glances at the half-terrified, half-laughing faces of the other children. They had all been crying. All except me. Something about that really bothered me. Boys didn’t cry as often as girls, and it made me wonder what the demon, or Ahura Mazda’s true motives were in “correcting” us before we could enter Paradise. I swallowed to steel my feelings and decided I wasn’t going to let the demon make me cry too. I raised my hand to explain myself.
The goat lady rolled her eyes a second time. “You have a question, Ms. Harper?”
I wanted to blurt how I wasn’t about to let my brother get eaten by a rabid animal raging through my family’s campsite, but hesitated. If I said something that irritated the demon, I wouldn’t be able to ask any questions. “Is my brother still alive?” My voice trembled, and I worried my resolve to keep this creature from taking advantage of my emotions would break down.
Betlize pressed her lips into a hard line. She leaned forward until we were almost nose to nose. The acrid, fishy smell in the room came from her . “Would you really like to know?”
The smell was so strong I covered my mouth and nose in disgust. My eyes watered from the horrid stench. I took a breath through my mouth to stay tears and nearly failed when I swallowed the noxious tang. I wanted to barf. I coughed and nodded. “Yes.”
The goat lady’s lips curled and split in an unpleasant smile, revealing an array of pointy yellow teeth. “You’re quite a tenacious child, aren’t you?”
I wanted to ask what tenacious meant, unable to decide if the goat lady had paid me a compliment or expressed irritation. I decided instead to save my voice for more important questions.
“You liked school, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Ms. Betlize.”
“Well, Justina, there is a special place in Hell for little girls like you.”
“Wait!”
She snapped her fingers. The chair fell out from under me. All sensations of my post-mortal body blurred into cold and darkness so expansive I thought I would dissolve into the very ether of oblivion. Just as my identity seemed about to disintegrate out of existence, my body slammed into a solid stone floor. Breath fled my lungs. I gasped until my diaphragm managed to pull in air. Fatigued beyond sense, disoriented, shocked by the uncaring vastness of the universe, I sank out of consciousness.
Pain bit my left cheek where my head rested against the floor. My neck and ribs pinched as I rolled over. Artificial daylight flooded my world from small, semi-spherical fixtures in a marbled blue, stone-hewn ceiling. I couldn’t tell if bulbs or something more ethereal produced the light.
I was alone in some sort of classroom with six neat rows of eight desks each. The walls and floor were all made of the same blue, white, and gray swirled stone as the ceiling. Low wooden bookshelves lined the walls. Instead of books, a collection of black stone tablets resembling the one the demon held were aligned, like the desks, in six rows of eight per shelf. I was pleased with myself for noticing this pattern right away, but puzzled to know what it meant or if it meant anything at all.
A massive whiteboard took u
p the whole wall at the front of the room. Scrawled in flowing blue ink from ceiling to floor was the message:
Welcome to Hell, little children! This Hell is based loosely on the Bolivian folktale known as “The Armadillo’s Song.” In order to leave, you must translate the ballad of your earthly life story into Avestan. When you are ready, simply stand in front of a whiteboard and sing your ballad from memory, word for word, and perfectly in tune without faltering or forgetting. When the song is complete, if it is accepted, you will be admitted into a glorious Paradise where all your questions, great and small, will be answered.
While you are here, we ask that you follow six simple rules:
1. Don’t cry for the people and things you miss. You no longer have families, and any meaningful ties you once had to other mortals in life no longer exist. Standard fleece blankets are, however, available in every dormitory should you feel the need to hide or shelter yourself for any reason.
2. Stand in line and wait your turn to request food in the cafeterias. A limited selection of healthy sandwiches and bean burritos are free. Anything else, including condiments and junk food, can be obtained for a price.
3. Work hard and try not to kill each other. There are no grown-ups here whatsoever to mediate on your behalf or tell you what to do. The more you work together to live in peace and harmony, the easier it will be to achieve your goals and leave Hell. If someone does die though, don’t worry. Everyone will be restored to life at the start of each new day.
4. Don’t try to sing familiar, happy songs to comfort yourself. You will only be disappointed.
5. Be kind to girls when you see them. There aren’t a lot of them in your Hell.
6. Don’t erase the whiteboards.
7. Focus on your own task, not on anyone else’s. No one is going to get you out of here but you.
8. Don’t get discouraged. Remember that nothing lasts forever!