by Tony Moyle
“Not an exit, a way out. They’re different. Do you know I thought it was enough that you were the stupidest person I’d ever met on Planet Earth, but in the short time we have been here I’ve discovered that you appear to be the most intellectually challenged person anywhere, at anytime, in any Universe. It’d be worth an award if it wasn’t so depressing.”
“A trophy or a medal?” asked Ian excitedly.
“It also makes me the most unfortunate person in history,” he said to himself. “Maybe that’s my punishment. Sandy, welcome to Hell, we were going to place you somewhere really nasty but when we saw you were friends with Ian, we all took a vote and agreed you’d suffered enough!”
“How many times can I say I’m sorry?”
“Many, many more times…”
“Sorry.”
“…and that will still never be enough. One day I hope you regret your actions rather than just apologising for them. Look, this is not the time. I’ve come up with a theory about how this place works and I need to find a like-minded creature with an IQ greater than nine to debate it with.”
“What sort of theory is that, then?” asked Ian.
“I said greater than nine, Ian, not lower.”
“Suit yourself, I was only playing along. I have other plans tonight, anyway, so I’d better set off.”
Level one wasn’t even close to being like the other levels in Hell. In many ways it was the equivalent of an open prison. Inmates came and went as they pleased, under the proviso they played nice with the guard, didn’t kill anyone, and made sure they were tucked up securely in bed by lights out. And even then the creatures had their vast habitats rather than any prison cells. There was only one guard and no one had ever been brave or stupid enough to break his rules. Although Primordial was rarely seen, everyone knew he had the habit and ability to turn up almost anywhere at anytime.
This unique freedom meant the animals of the various habitats were in constant contact, with little fear of contravention. A lack of punishment or confinement made death here bearable. An initial lack of planning or guidelines for managing reincarnates meant they were pretty much left to their own devices. So far a thousand or more Earth years had passed and the ‘days since last incident board’ was still stuck on nought.
“What do you mean you have other plans?” asked Sandy, drawn away from his observations of the window for the first time.
“There’s going to be a ‘pass over’ party,” replied Ian.
“A what?”
“Well, apparently when a soul is totally worn out it leaves the vessol and returns to the Universe. They call it a pass over. Down here they celebrate it like a funeral.”
“Interesting. What time does it start?”
“Hard to say. No one really knows. Everyone just collects in the region where the creature is and waits for it to happen. By all accounts Paul’s been looking dodgy for several weeks now,” said Ian.
“Who’s Paul?”
“He’s one of level zero’s oldest residents and a soon-to-be extinct dolphin,” replied Ian.
“Perfect,” said Sandy. “Dolphins have a much higher IQ than you. Let’s go.”
- CHAPTER FOUR -
NUMBER TWELVE
The crack in the Alps, that first emerged over a decade ago, was quite the tourist attraction. Gone were the days when small groups of plimsoll-wearing Chinese punters were only interested in the panorama of vast, ancient glaciers. That was so nineteenth-century. Now an hour’s walk from the Jungfrau visitor centre was a huge crater that allowed the paying public a view into the Earth. When the sun was out you could see a metallic sphere at the bottom of the thousand-metre drop.
To aid the view, and protect from any mishaps, they’d already constructed a viewing platform. It had absolutely nothing to do with making money. It was purely coincidence that you had to pay five euros for the privilege of looking into a hole. Sadly for David they’d not yet finished the extension of the railway line that would lead right up to it.
Retracing steps that John had taken on the longest day many years previously, he made his way through the snow and up the slight incline. He’d booked onto the last available time slot and, unlike the others in his group, he was well prepared not to return with them. A huge backpack, brimming with bulges and lumps, was carried with the ease of a husky pulling a sledge. He made light work of the journey, eager to reach the viewing platform even before his guide could.
Several minutes before anyone else, the lanky frame of a young Latino boy leant over the metal barrier to take in the full scale of the void. There it was, just how he remembered it. As the sun started to set over the mountains, a shimmering, metallic slope glinted up at him from the heart of the Alps. If his eyes weren’t deceiving him there was even a scattered wooden door panel, once part of a hillside retreat, stuck in the very top.
“I see your legs are stronger than mine and I work here,” said a man in a red and black Jungfrau-embroidered jacket.
“I grew up in the mountains,” replied David. “I’m used to much higher peaks than this one.”
“Gather in the rest of you.”
He gestured to the half a dozen stragglers making their way onto the platform out of breath.
“Will this take long?” asked David. “I’m keen to get on.”
“Now that we are all here I can start with the tour. Welcome to one of the greatest wonders of our natural world, the heart of the mountain. Some one thousand metres below you is a discovery that is still a mystery to mankind. A dozen years ago a seismic event split this valley open to reveal an object that still baffles all scientific experts.”
Although many expeditions over the last decade had made attempts to solve the mystery of the sphere, none had succeeded. Separate parties of mountaineers and scientists had climbed down to the strange, metallic dome, but none had figured out what it was or why it was there. The first group attempted to take a sample. They failed but took the opportunity to name the substance.
“The metal of the dome has been given the name Celestium. It has never before been detected on Earth, or any place of human exploration. It’s a completely new substance. There are many theories as to why it’s there. Some experts believe it is a by-product formed through volcanic activity, and some believe it’s an alien spaceship,” he said with a laugh. “Some mountaineers have claimed to have witnessed blue energy being drawn to the sphere or seeping from it. One has even suggested the sphere contains Heaven itself. Mountaineers, though, are known to get rather caught up in their own stories, and I for one have never seen the blue gas for myself. Anyway, please take a moment to look around before we make our descent back to the visitor centre.”
A number of complex and lengthy zoom lenses were immediately added to cameras to capture the best shot. David didn’t need zooms: he was planning to get up close and personal with it later.
“Excuse me,” he asked the guide. “Why did the scientists fail to discover more about it?”
“Good question. As much as they’ve tried it has not been possible to remove a sample. Every time they attempt to extract one the whole structure becomes as solid as the rock beneath your feet. Yet when they move away from it, the structure continues to flow freely in front of them like a liquid.”
“Interesting. Maybe scientists called it Celestium because not everything can be understood by physics?”
“You may be right,” replied the guide.
“Anyway, an excellent tour but I’m going to make my way back. You’ll only slow me down,” said David.
He had no intention of returning to the sanctuary and warmth of the corporate-coloured coffee kiosk and overpriced gift shop. As he retreated out of sight of the group he made a detour in order to double-back on himself. As darkness fell and the rest of the group were well on their way back to home base, David returned to the platform. Unpacking his oversized rucksack he unfurled a parasail and prepared for launch.
Just as he’d seen fellow enthusiasts do throughout the day, he ran
a few steps and felt the sail catch the wind. Unlike the others, who enjoyed the rush of floating effortlessly past the north face of the Eiger, a cliff that had taken decades and countless lives to successfully climb, he spiralled into the chasm, winding like a screw cutting through a cork. Finally he came to rest where metal sphere met jagged stone.
David was grateful that the scientists who had gone before him had only attempted to remove a sample and hadn’t yet had the foresight to attempt entry. After all, they didn’t know what was inside. Gently he submerged a hand and the metal consumed it just as his soul remembered. Without fear of failure he walked confidently through the wall.
It was a trip that David’s body had never made, even though his soul was more than used to it. Pushing his skinny, muscular body further through the liquid, he crossed his fingers, hoping the end would come soon. After several minutes he burst through the other end of the wall of metal and with a squelch it wobbled back into place as if nothing had disturbed it. The scene in front of him was not as he imagined it.
Limbo had always had a dimly lit quality to it. Normally that came from four gigantic pyres that jutted from the sides like the points of a compass. Whether they were still there, unlit, was unclear, as only one source of light was obvious. Like a Navy squadron on shore leave, a trickle of blue, electric gas was marching erratically from a point to his left down the smooth surfaces and up to the white funnel, only visible from the light emitting from the line of souls.
Torch in hand, he made his way carefully down to the centre. David felt no anxiety for this change in his expectations. Everything had an explanation even if the evidence was currently unavailable. It wasn’t arrogance that drove him either, even though many in the past had accused him of it. In his short life he’d appeared to demonstrate a level of bravery far bolder than any of his peers. As long as he was able to calculate the odds of success against failure he did so without flinching. This lack of empathy had not endeared him to children his own age. Plus he was over five feet by the age of six, which definitely hadn’t helped in making friends. They called him Goliat, Spanish for ‘Goliath’, a smart biblical reference for a bunch of nursery schoolkids.
David questioned everything. The main one on his lips right now was: where is everybody? Limbo was hardly a place of great human density, but on every other occasion there were at least some people around. Now there was no one. Unless you counted the line of souls being fed into the white funnel like a never-ending sausage machine. There were no trials for these souls. The line was unbroken from the metal wall to the white cone, and when each popped and crackled their energy underneath it, they were immediately sucked up and away. As he shone his torch up at the funnel he found the answer to where some of the people were.
Nailed to the cone by his feet and outstretched hands was a withered skeleton hanging upside down. Pinstriped material hung limply to its frame to confirm its identity. It had always been David’s intention to kill Laslow. Now someone had beaten him to it. This intention was not brimming with emotional intent, it was just how David’s mind worked. The deed had to be completed and the fact someone else already had was enough for him. Who had done it didn’t bother him. It didn’t intrigue him how he died. Why he’d been killed was far more interesting. He removed his writing pad and slowly drew a line through Laslow’s name.
Although Laslow’s demise had been a surprise, what he found at the base of the white funnel certainly wasn’t. The lever that John tried to switch from ‘negative’ to ‘positive’ in order to redirect Sandy’s soul was now set permanently to ‘negative’. It wasn’t a shock because he knew that all souls went in one direction. He just didn’t know why yet. It was the big, elephant-sized unanswered question. If this situation had always been the case, why had John been put through his mock trial all those years ago? The only thing to do was to retrace John’s very first steps in this peculiar place.
Doing his best to avoid the unpredictable movement of the souls as they bobbed apprehensively down the stairs that led to the centre, he located their entry point into the sphere. There was no obvious door to allow them out, they just seeped through like the water from a faulty washing machine. He knew that the waiting room was on the other side but before he ploughed his way through the liquid, something caught his attention.
A build-up of electricity was forming a pocket like a boil on the surface of the Celestium. The cyst-like bulge struggled to burst the outer membrane of the metal as it repeatedly attempted to break through. Whatever this thing was it had managed to stem the flow of any other souls into Limbo. David watched intently to see which foreign object would be the first to buckle under the pressure. The build-up of intensity was too much for the wall and finally a dark blue cloud of electricity breached its prison.
There was no question it was a soul, although it shared none of the conformity that went with the thousands that were marching their way to their unknown doom. This soul was much less stable. It attempted to break itself in half as it wrestled with some internal conflict. The only noise an unclothed soul made came from the crackle of the electrical charges that occasionally discharged from the storm-like structure of its body. Not this soul. This one moaned as if the emotions it was constructed from were rebelling against its own existence.
As it charged forward, quite unprepared to wait in line, it met its first opposition. The line of souls waited patiently for the one in front to move forward, having learnt through experience not to push in case it had the misfortune of coming into contact with another. The dark blue soul let out a screech of pressure and, without warning, approached and then consumed the soul directly in front of it. As the electric blue particles of its foe disappeared inside it, David was certain he heard a deep belching noise.
The commotion was not lost on the souls in the queue. One by one, as if ordered by an extrasensory memo, they moved rapidly to one side, leaving a clear path all the way down to the centre. Its cloudy chest pushed out like an alpha male, the mutation roared its approval and marched down the steps to a guard of honour. It sneered at the masses as it floated past them. From his position at the wall, David struggled to see it reach the bottom, but he certainly heard it. The psycho soul let out what can only be described as a war cry as it leapt in the air and was shot through the funnel en route to the farthest reaches of the Universe.
After a brief pause to see whether the anomaly was likely to return, the collective souls returned to their queue. Was that what he thought it was? In his analytical way of thinking there was no other explanation for it. He continued on his original path, making mental notes of his experience to be jotted down in his notebook when the light was more acceptable. Once more he pushed through the metal.
On the other side of the wall the waiting room was empty except for the line of souls, some scattered pamphlets and an open door into the next room. It was the same picture in the Tailor’s room. Apparently you just couldn’t get the staff these days. The wardrobe, where John had first picked out a body for himself, was tightly shut. With no one to clothe them, the souls showed no interest in it, bundling past one another to be the first to make it to the waiting room. What was the hurry? Did they really have no idea what they were getting themselves into?
David opened the wardrobe and confidently strode inside. Two lines of prosthetic bodies hung on hooks down either side. They were tattier and more worn than he remembered them, as if the lack of an internal occupant for company had in some way damaged their quality. As he moved nonchalantly down the line, far further than John had done, the flaccid bodysuits swayed with the breeze from his movement. All but one. One of the bodies seemed much thicker and fuller than the rest and its feet weren’t hanging in the air.
“I know a prosthetic body when I see one. I’ve been inside a few after all, and you are not one,” he said to the body whose eyes were firmly shut.
“Go away,” it whispered from the corner of its mouth.
“You’re not fooling anyone, you know,”
replied David. “I know who you are.”
“No, you don’t. I’m not available, pick a different body and be on your way.”
“Clerk, what are you doing here?”
The Clerk opened one eye, expecting to see someone he recognised but perplexed and confused that he didn’t. “Who are you?”
“It’s a good question, I’ll tell you when I figure it out. What are you hiding from?”
“I’m not hiding…I’m…resting.”
“Pull the other one,” said David.
“There’s nothing to see here.”
“Yes there is! There’s a mass of souls swimming in and out of Limbo like a chaotic eight-year-old’s birthday party. There’s no Tailor, no court and no order. What happened?”
“Hold on. How did you get in here? You’re not a soul, you’re wearing a real body and everything.”
“I have a personal interest in this place. Let’s just say I know where the exits are. Now what say we stop messing around in a wardrobe like a couple of naughty teenagers and take this conversation outside?”
The Clerk shook off his poor acting and nodded in agreement. As he moved slowly through each room he appeared on edge. All the confidence and energy that once flowed effortlessly through him, part of a job that he seemed to both enjoy and excel at, had gone. The hair on his head had receded more than the twelve years should have reasonably expected, and there were marks of violence across his arms and face. Once back in the waiting room, he sank into a plastic seat.
“What happened here?” asked David once it appeared that the Clerk’s pulse rate had returned to an acceptable level.
“He killed everyone. Everyone except me, that is.”
“Who did?”
“Well, Lucifer, of course. No one had any idea that he was here.”
“Lucifer was here?”
“Yes, it appears he always had been. He was possessing Laslow’s body all the time,” said the Clerk. “But now he has one all to himself.”
