by Mon D Rea
“Sub-level 6: Split-level practitioners, the hypocrites and the intolerant…”
The elevator dings and right away my bladder empties again, releasing a warm, even flow inside the leg of my wetsuit. A giant hand made entirely of roaring flames squeezes in and pinches people between its thumb and forefinger, instantly roasting them and singeing everyone else around. The obscene smell of burning human flesh fills the elevator, then the spirits are lifted away and locked in flaming coffins.
I’m now too terrified for myself to think of anything else. The next will be my stop, the Seventh Circle where all suicides are punished. And I can’t for the life of me remember…
Another hand, at least of normal size, pokes in at the last moment and catches the closing doors. I become fixated on the fact that this hand is perfectly human, with a ring on every finger; rings of all gothic themes, mainly skulls but also scorpion, talon, jester and a black pearl.
When the elevator doors reopen, this new character steps in wearing a black cloak with a hood that completely hides its face except for two glowing, predatory eyes; all reminiscent of Kharon. The striking resemblance to the ferryman makes my heart skip a beat.
For a reason unknown even to my enhanced psychic abilities, this newcomer is carrying a guitar case. His identity, however, is readily clear to me: King Death.
Chapter IV: Hell’s Supercomputer
“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike Charon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will send shivers up and down your spine. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave, gravelly and frosty, and gives the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal underworld.
The elevator boy makes the sole little mistake of doubting what he has just been told and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a smooth, round mass of flesh.
The face is heartrendingly crude, like a stickman’s face traced in dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death (whose own face is still hidden from me), they bulge. No sight could be more literal for the expression “eye-popping.” From the taut skin, vitreous humor the size and shape of billiard balls jump and dangle at the end of raw, exposed nerves; like the trademark feature of a Ghostbuster action figure, only more graphic.
To help him hold this reaction, the exact spot he’s standing on collapses like a trapdoor and he disappears into a neat black square; that is, the whole person except for his innards still attached to the ceiling. First, the organs stretch like the longest suspenders then, the instant slingshot that they are, they fling the elevator boy straight into and through the ceiling in a blur, creating his own jagged emergency exit. The poor kid leaves with a final, reverberating snap.
All these things were made possible by pure psychokinetic energy, which I fear to be only one of my new tormentor’s many abilities. We’re finally alone in the car and this thought fills me with cold, paralyzing terror. I imagine this is how a mouse feels when placed inside the cage of a python. Around this character Death, wanton violence is the norm like in an episode of Tom and Jerry, but the pranks are much too real to be funny and they’re just shockingly brutal. Then again there’s something strangely right about a Grim Reaper that’s funny in his own twisted way.
Like the world’s most cruel punch line, it turns out there’s actually a panel of buttons to control the elevator, where Death now proceeds to input a secret code.
Everything starts shaking and, before I can crunch my stomach right where it is, we drop like a boulder.
I can’t tell just by looking at Death though. No matter how fast we’re falling, the Grim Reaper stands as erect and elegant as a general in the bombed frontlines, the back of his hood still turned to me. We slide past more torture floors, reach the bottom and still keep going.
The bottom has fallen out and the elevator walls are revealed to be made of glass once they slide out of their shaft. And so, with a stomach-lurching, top-of-the-world view spreading out beyond my toes, I pray that my unattached VIP box is impervious to boiling magma because that’s exactly where we’re headed.
As imagined, there’s a whole army of giants toiling on ledges as we plummet at breakneck speed, but everything in this part of the netherworld is in titanic proportions that even though we do, I don’t miss a thing. In fact, if I didn’t know any better and if the glass walls of my prison weren’t rattling like tin roof in a hail storm, I’d think we were traveling in slow motion.
Buried here in the very center of the earth crouches gargantuan Abaddon, hideous and malformed with inky fur, three heads and three pairs of membranous bat wings. There’s magma all over the colossal walls but the ground, the middle of hell itself, is made of smoking ice and the Great Red Dragon is buried to the waist in it. All three of his jaws are chomping down on three other major personalities – the heavyweights, the senior and most coveted inmates of hell (one of them I think is Hitler) – and as tears fall from his six bloodshot eyes, they mix with the blood of these VIPs.
I say another quick prayer that we wouldn’t crash into any of the six massive wings as the beast makes his endless attempts to escape. And miraculously, we miss every wall of claw and membrane. We pass so close to Abaddon I could touch the pitch-black, unholy fur if I just reached out my hand.
We drop squarely into an opening under the monster and the next thing I know the elevator’s clattering through very narrow pipelines. In all the confusion, my restraints slacken and I promptly do a reverse head-butt.
I feel blood flow in an instant. There’s a flush of heat, a blur, and then everything turns to black.
****
I was out for an uncertain amount of time. As I drift back into consciousness, I hear nothing but silence; tomblike and earsplitting. I fearfully open my eyes and take in my surroundings while doing a mental check of every ache in my body. I’m alive and, all things considered, still in one piece in Death’s office.
Death has an office. This impression is only the second one I get; the first that actually entered my mind was: mind-blown.
The room I’m in is the exact scene of my persistent nightmare. In all four directions, floor to ceiling the walls are covered with computer monitors, every one of them showing a different video feed. The only thing I wasn’t able to foresee is their outlandish, hexagonal shape and how they all fit one another like the inside of a beehive. The material that makes up their edges is crude and looks like a whitish, waxy substance secreted by some insect of horrifying size. Also, it’s not liquid crystal inside the monitors but water somehow engineered to flow upwards instead of down, probably from yet another enchanted river.
The noise that the computers emit is eerily accurate, however. There’s no mistaking that hybrid insectile-mechanical drone. It’s the white noise that has surrounded my entire life; this perverse sound of death.
Each and every monitor in the room is showing a scene straight out of painfully innocent human lives: people going about their everyday affairs oblivious of these very powerful spy cams trained on them. At first, the feeds look like home videos but the longer you look at them the more you see that not all of them are memorable or even properly focused; they’re just your candid people seen from both routine and God-worthy perspectives – standing in a jam-packed subway, kneeling in church, making love in a run-down apartment, passing a joint at a party…
It finally hits me as more of the same thing enter my consciousness: all the people have what appear to be white balloons attached to their necks. These things are floating and bobbing after their owners like real balloons but they’re sort of meatier and softly lit like paper lanterns, from the fat strings to the ovals themselves. These balloons also have varying
lengths of string for each person and thus reach more than one height. Some kiss faces while others tower as high as skyscrapers and yet, inexplicably, the humans live their lives completely unaware of this excess baggage. And whenever the string of a balloon gets caught somewhere or crosses that of another, they never get tangled but dissolve and reconstitute themselves in a flash.
I recall one other place I’ve seen them: down the River Akheron where they float, deflated but recognizable.
Umballicus, their name echoes in my ear, in Kharon’s ogre voice.
The thing that really knocks the wind out of me though, even after all I’ve been through, is the fact that in one of the monitors nearest me I can see Samantha. Sam. Simply thinking of her name makes me feel old, ancient; and home feels like billions of light-years away, both in space and time.
Sam’s umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks faintly familiar. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless guitar and sobbing piteously. It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s in mourning. For me. And all at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the force of a 4G bullet to the brain, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence:
In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sam that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The man lying in the hospital bed is Nataniel Cuervo but at the same time not him. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell.
She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pals in so much as they still keep me with her. The ICP monitor attached to my skull, the pads on my chest linked to the ECG, the ventilator pumping air into my lungs through a tube inside my windpipe, the PEG tube going directly to my stomach wall…
She worries about bed sores. She feels anger – at herself, me, the fishermen’s children who stole me from her, God – but always there’s the gnawing feeling of not knowing what comes next. She feels the urge to do something stupid and crazy, to tear away clumps of her hair and scream herself hoarse because she could’ve done something to prevent everything. She should’ve seen it coming. At least this is what she believes.
Ironically, it’s during this time (time flows much faster in the world of the living than it does in the land of the dead) that she finally learns about my personal history, deeper than what she would have found out under normal circumstances. That I was a foundling and most of my childhood had been spent drifting from house to house, family to family. That I didn’t have any real parents to speak of though I pretended to be just like everyone else; when all I had was a name assigned by a social worker and a judge. Nataniel Cuervo, after all, was too fancy a name to be true.
The unglamorous truth is, when I was an infant I was discovered naked and wailing inside a cardboard box in front of Blessed Children’s, with nothing so much as a note or a piece of lint in the way of identification; nothing except an inquisitive crow standing by like some emissary of the devil. To the old nuns it seemed as though I had been delivered to earth by a crow instead of the usual stork. Hence the name Nataniel Cuervo – child of the crow.
Going back to the crisis at hand, I can see in the monitors how Sam’s silently suffering inside. She acts calmly and bravely above my bed but collapses like a castle of cards out of earshot. More than any man at any point in his life, I’m now aware of how grief is the other side of the same coin. Love, heartbreak, memories, pain; humans can never really have one without the other. Any idea to the contrary is nothing but human illusion.
I guess it’s Sam’s private limbo counting the days that I didn’t open my eyes while dreading what will come after. The doctors are already talking about pulling the plug as I’ve been declared brain dead. I’ve lost a lot of functions in my cerebrum, cerebellum, and brain stem but amazingly my heart still makes normal cycles per minute. I know it’s just a matter of time though.
“Diabolical, isn’t it?” My skin breaks out in goose bumps when I realize Death’s in the same room. More alarmingly, the dark angel’s addressing me in that voice that will wither a freshly-bloomed flower.
“The Lachesis supercomputers, courtesy of the Fate Weaver. These machines are thought-run. They never lie. They always show you the thing you desire the most to see.”
I recognize the name Lachesis from my constant nightmare and my memory of Greek myths, but Fate Weaver doesn’t ring a bell.
At Death’s words, the computer monitors directly in front of him flicker and switch to only one image and, from where he stands with his hands clasped at the back of his cloak, it’s like a huge wave of dominoes rolls over and spreads this single image to every last monitor until it’s almost narcissistic; except instead of his own reflection, we’re now looking at a striking woman sitting at a coffee shop, reading a book and just enjoying her private time. She could be an actress or a model judging by her looks.
I wonder about this woman, and also the Fate Weaver, and just about a hundred other questions running through my head. But the thought of speaking to this spawn of darkness, the reaper of souls, was enough to zip the mouth of even the most loquacious man.
“Don’t fall on your face, you maggoty meat,” Death hisses with pure vehemence. “I hate your kind that stutter even inside your heads.” When he says this, it’s with a distaste reserved only for squashed roaches still crawling with their insides sticking out. Now concerned for my safety more than ever, my brain registers how the glass elevator has split in the middle and its only remaining piece is the wall on which I hang; very convenient for my captor, though something also tells me nothing ever happens around the Grim Reaper by accident.
Indeed the only damage I can find is the portion of the ceiling above me, a ventilation shaft that has expanded as if it had been burst open with dynamite, and the immediate spot on the floor that has buckled and cracked under the weight of my imported mounting board. Apart from these, the room is spick and span.
There’s a customized desk made of luxurious ebony in the middle of the room. On top of it, there’s a solid-brass name plate proclaiming in big, bold letters: SEPHTIMUS REX, CHIEF ASTRAL DEPORTER. But counting these out, the office is spartan and lacks even chairs for a visitor (not that I’d be needing any) or Sephtimus Rex himself to sit on.
As though reading my mind and not liking what he finds there, Sephtimus Rex swivels on his heels to face me and take off his hood. I brace myself for the worst. The most grotesque and sickening sight yet. I resign myself to the impending revelation, the climax to all the evil man wasn’t meant to see.
Chapter V: Love Macabre
I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or cheated when I find underneath the black hood, the mother of all anticlimaxes: a Dia de los Muertos mask. Yet somehow I feel I know the reason behind this diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspires; to see it in all its raw potential is to literally explode my head.
Then, in one fluid, memorized motion, Sephtimus whirls his cloak off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of monitors to take the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal; tragically its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, which is anyway perfect for this occasion as a peg. Sephtimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit, before stiffening ramrod straight like a foot guard at Buckingham Palace.
I discover the reaper is wearing a black leather trench coat with crisscrossing metal-studded straps sewn on the shoulders and the chest, suggestive of a straitjacket that ironically restrains the warden of hell. The coat’s lining sweeps all the way down to the floor, which is probably for the best because there’s no sign of feet whatsoever under it.
When Sephtimus finally sits behind his desk – more like throws himself down in total abandon – another apparition scurries on all fours to catch him while three more jump from behin
d to support his back and arms; all four of them melding into one grand throne made entirely of human bones. Sephtimus then takes a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and one of his melded assistants dislocates its forearm to light his stick with one hinged finger. Apparently, everything in this room is a living extension of the Chief Astral Deporter and exists to serve on his every whim.
“I swear, nicotine and caffeine are going to be the death of me,” he says to himself, smoking with humanoid lips in the fraction of space between the maxilla of his skull mask and his coat’s stand-up collar. But he sounds so pleased with himself that I doubt if he means what he’s saying.
All at once it comes to me with an almost physical shock; this mind-boggling observation. Death has pursed his actual lips when he took a drag on his cigarette but for any other purpose than this, his mouth doesn’t budge. His lips are a frozen ornament when he speaks. Death has been communicating with me through telepathy!
“Bravo!” Sephtimus hisses. “Faster than the others.”
Others? What does he mean others?
“One thought at a time, meatball. First, let me address your sloppy question with a proper answer.” He motions with his thin human fingers holding the cigarette towards the now lively, constantly shifting mosaic of the mystery girl at the coffee shop.
“This,” Sephtimus rasps, “this is my Helen, as you would say in your tongue, my Cleopatra, my Delilah.” His metaphors sound as though they’ve been pilfered from comprehensive summaries, highly suspicious and out of place. Who could’ve imagined hearing Death quote from English literature, even the Bible!