The Lovely Shadow

by Cory Hiles

  Eventually, along with the sound that millions of chittering beetles were making while chewing on my flesh, there came another sound. Distant voices that came from everywhere and nowhere reached my aching ears.

  Even with the beetles that were squirming deep inside my ears, slowly chewing their way into my skull where they could feast on my brain, I could hear the voices.

  “Poison… Poison… Poison… Poison”

  The chanting continued unceasingly for millennia; the beetles chewed my agonized body, and finally wormed their way into my skull after a million years of gnawing through the tough cartilage of my inner ears, and at the same time they began forcing their way up into my nostrils, and after another millennium I felt them squirming behind my eyes.

  Another hundred thousand years passed and the beetles discovered that they could chew off my lips and enter my mouth where they found easy access to my throat and easy passage all the tasty morsels that lay at the bottom of my esophagus.

  Or perhaps it only took a second. I’m not sure. There’s no Time in Hell.

  The voices chanted and the beetles chewed. The voices never grew tired or hoarse and no matter how much flesh the beetles consumed, it seemed that they never removed a single ounce of flesh from me so there was always an available banquet for them to dine upon.

  There is no time in Hell and I’m not sure how long these torments continued; thousands of years, perhaps, or maybe only a second.

  For a million years I scratched and clawed and slapped myself in the darkness, flinging countless beetles off my body, screaming silently and suffering a mouthful of beetles every time I opened my mouth to scream. In the darkness the voices continued to tell me I was poison.

  My God, how I wished I had been insane.

  After several billion years of torment, or perhaps only a second, something changed. Screaming, scratching, choking, and listening to the deafening cries of “Poison” in the tar black pits of Hell I perceived a light!

  The light blinded me in its intensity, even though it seemed to be miles away. It was just a speck in the distance and it illuminated nothing of my surroundings.

  I continued to scratch and scream, and choke, but kept my eyes focused on the light. I didn’t dare to hope that the light meant anything other than a new and more destructive torment. But in the infinity of dark torture, hope comes more easily than it does in the world of light and shadows that I had left only seconds before; or perhaps it was billions of years before, and I found myself hoping against all odds.

  The light seemed to take centuries to reach me and as my eyes grew accustomed to the brightness of it I could see that it appeared to be a translucent bubble, roughly the size of a bowling ball, with rainbows swirling on its surface, giving the impression that the bubble was rotating slowly left to right and top to bottom.

  The swirling, shining sphere floated directly to me and stopped. When its light fell upon me in full force, the millions of beetles that had been eating me for the past infinity scurried away like cockroaches across the linoleum when the light switch has been tripped.

  From my flesh, from my nostrils, from my mouth, and ears they fled. I felt them racing up my throat and out of any available orifice in my head that they could find in their desperation to flee the light that had stopped mere feet away from me.

  My eyes never left the orb in front of me but my attention was still divided between it and the last of the bugs as they fled from the light. When the final bug tried to scurry away I saw it from the corner of my eye and stomped my foot upon it, crushing the wicked life out of the tormenting devil with a satisfying ‘crunch’.

  When I heard the beast crunch beneath my foot I realized that I was surrounded by silence for the first time in…well I don’t know how long. The accusing voices had fled along with the beetles.

  I stared at the luminescent orb and tried to find my voice to thank it. I didn’t know exactly what was in front of me, but I was certain that it was most definitely good.

  I had spent enough time—centuries or seconds—in the presence of evil that I had an acute sensitivity to the feel of it. The orb projected a completely opposite aura to that of the evil that had invaded me.

  The orb flooded me with light, warmth and an indisputable feeling of love.

  Even though the bubble emitted a powerfully bright light, the light illuminated only me. There was only blackness where the floor should have been, there were no walls, and I cast no shadow.

  The whole scene gave me the impression that I was floating in space and I suffered a moment of vertigo as I realized that what I had thought was floor was really just more blackness.

  I continued struggling to find my voice for several seconds… seconds! I had regained a sense of time in the presence of this benevolent being and the realization of that fact pushed my voice even further down my throat.

  Finally, after perhaps realizing that I was speechless, or perhaps after finding its own voice after an internal struggle of its own, the bubble spoke to me.

  “Hello, Johnny. Have you missed Mommy?”

  CHAPTER 34

  I was unaware that is was possible to pass out when you were dead and trapped in the pits of Hell, but that is exactly what I did.

  When I came to I had fully expected the whole thing to have been some kind of nightmare. I figured that I was going to wake up and find myself back at the farm, with June still alive, her cancer still in remission, and Elle waiting happily for me to die.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw a glowing bubble silhouetted against a curtain of impossible darkness.

  I sat up from the nonexistent floor where I had tumbled to and stared at the orb. The orb pulsed in response, as if it were acknowledging my look with a slight head nod.

  Somehow I managed to find my voice and I croaked, “Mama?”

  “Yes,” the orb replied.

  I knew in that moment that it was my mother’s consciousness that stood before me; her soul’s soul so to speak. My voice took on an acerbic edge when I next spoke

  “You’re in Hell, Mama. With me…Am I your Hell, Mama?”

  Feelings that I had repressed since the age of seven—for millennia, or perhaps only for years, I’m not sure which—bubbled to the surface and I was unable to keep the anger from my voice as I spit those words at her.

  Instead of striking back with a spiteful comment of her own, my mother’s orb simply seemed to deflate slightly. The projection of love that I had felt did not diminish, and did not transform into anger. If anything, the sense of love that I felt grew only more poignant.

  “I thought you were, once. I was wrong. I was my own Hell, you could have been my salvation if I would have allowed it, but I was blinded by my own selfishness.”

  “Why, Mama,” I asked, with tears rising in my eyes, (I was as unaware that a person could cry in Hell as I had been about fainting in Hell) “Why did you let the Sickness take you? Why did you let the Sickness beat me? Why did you let the Sickness torture me? Humiliate me? WHY DID YOU LET THE SICKNESS ABANDON ME IN THE DARK?”

  I had assumed that I would never be allowed a proper accounting for my mother’s actions in my youth, and now, faced with an orb that spoke in a voice that was undeniably my mother’s I had an opportunity to get the answers I had sought.

  My mother’s orb diminished in brightness with every question I threw at it, and eventually grew so dim that it would have been invisible anywhere else but in the utter darkness.

  “Johnny, please forgive me. There is no acceptable answer to those questions. I was lost in despair and when the Sickness came, it felt like relief. I didn’t understand that the Sickness filled me with Poison.”

  “Ignorance of my actions does not excuse my actions, my Son. Yet I have no better answer to give you. I am so sorry.”

  I stood in the darkness glaring at my mother’s deepest soul and was overcome by the realization that the deep soul (or consciousness) can not lie.

  When my mother told me that she did not kn
ow what she was doing, when she begged forgiveness, and when she apologized, she meant every word of it from the very deepest part of her being—her soul’s soul.

  I felt my anger melt, and true forgiveness entered my heart at last. For years, or centuries, I’m not sure which, I had lived (and died) with the assumption that I had forgiven my mother, but I had not really.

  I’m not sure I ever could have forgiven her fully without this moment of realization that she was honestly repentant. For a brief glimmering second (yes just a very, very brief second) I was happy to have met my mother in Hell, so I could finally find full forgiveness for her.

  It also helped that she’d managed to chase away the Dermestid beetles that had been eating me alive for eons.

  “I forgive you, Mama. For real this time. From the bottom of my heart, Mama, I forgive you.”

  My mother’s orb shimmered and vibrated in front of me and I had the impression that she was weeping, though she made no sound and had no bodily features to prove my theory.

  “Thank you Johnny. You have granted me the one thing that I have always needed, but never deserved. I can disappear into the void now, at peace.”

  “What do you mean disappear?”

  My mother’s orb drifted towards me and hovered only inches from my nose. In its shimmering, swirling surface I caught a glimpse of my mother’s young face, before the Sickness took her, smiling at me with tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Her lips moved as she whispered to me, “I love you more than existence, Johnny.”

  With those words her orb made contact with me and seemed to enter into me. I felt like I was being electrocuted. My entire being convulsed with the charge that was flowing through me. I lost all control of my muscles and fell backwards, stiff as a board.

  Instead of impacting the invisible floor as I had when I passed out I felt myself hovering. Every muscle was tensed; my arms and legs pointing straight out away from my torso.

  I began to rotate slowly and I opened my mouth to scream in terror. I didn’t know what my mother was doing to me, and it didn’t hurt per se, but it wasn’t exactly as pleasing as a deep tissue massage might have been.

  When my mother entered me I was once again engulfed by darkness, when I opened my mouth to scream, a beam of light shot out of it rather than a stream of sound. I could sense the same blinding light behind my eyes, which caused my vision to become tinted with a red haze.

  Light shot out of my nostrils and my ears, and finally burst out of my eyes as well. I began to rotate faster. I spun so fast that I could feel the centrifugal force pulling desperately at all my extremities, creating unnatural pressure in places where there had never been pressure before.

  Eventually the tips of my fingers burst with the pressure, but instead of flinging blood, beams of bright white light shot out of the wounds. My toes were the next thing to burst with blinding light, and finally my head exploded, illuminating the entirety of Hell with infinite streams of blinding light that I could still perceive, even though I had no eyes left to see with.

  I think this was the point at which I passed out again.

  CHAPTER 35

  When I came to again I found myself squinting against the brightness of a summer sky and the immeasurably beautiful face of Elle staring down at me.

  “YOU IDIOT!” she screamed at me, “You could have been killed!”

  Knowing that it was not going to go over well, but unable to contain myself in spite of the danger, I laughed out loud. I laughed long and deep, and the more I laughed, the more Elle’s face twisted and contorted into shapes of unimaginable depths of anger, and the harder I had to laugh.

  I’ve got to hand it to Elle, though she was absolutely furious with my recklessness, and even more so by my laughter, she never moved away from me, which was wonderful for me, for as my laughing fit finally subsided, I was able to raise my head only slightly and plant a big, sloppy kiss squarely upon her lips.

  “Hello, Darling,” I said after removing my lips from hers. “Did you miss me?”

  “Johnny Krimshaw! You infuriating, sonofa…you…I should kill you just for surviving!”

  Elle was so angry that she could only barely make coherent words, which I found vastly amusing. Everything was vastly amusing.

  The sun was warmer, the grass greener, the sky bluer, and my love for Elle sweeter than I had ever known them to be. But I suppose after spending a billion years—or perhaps only seconds—in Hell, everything is bound to seem wonderful by comparison.

  I did not dare try to explain to Elle where I had been or what I had been up to, for if she knew the truth of how close we had come to being eternally separated she would likely never forgive me.

  Perhaps when she reads this manuscript she will have calmed herself down enough to find forgiveness for me, or perhaps even amusement, but whether she will or not doesn’t change the fact that I was not a brave enough soul to tell her about my experience on that day, and have not found the courage to do so in all the years since.

  I sat up and dusted myself off. I was covered with shards of glass and had some serious grass stains on my hands and knees, and, according to Elle, on the top of my head.

  “Come on Darling,” I said casually, ignoring Elle’s anger for the moment, “let’s take a walk to the pond.”

  Elle gave me the most exasperated look I’d ever seen on a person, either living or dead, but consented to hold my hand as we walked silently towards the pond.

  We sat beneath the great willow and I basked in the contrasting sensations of warm sunlight that shone on my body through gaps in the branches, and cool shadow where the sun was unable to penetrate the canopy.

  As we sat there, I explained to Elle how I had first seen Louie beneath that very tree, and how it had seemed so odd to me that he did not have an aura around him like every other physical object that I saw in this world.

  I further went on to explain my interpretation of what the auras really represented, and how I had begun to suspect the nature of the auras when I saw June’s aura expanding when she grew sicker.

  “The auras that I see,” I explained as well as I could, “are a disruption in the fabric that separates the physical world from the spiritual world, or to put it differently, the other side. All physical objects in this world had their origins in the spiritual world, as creations of God.”

  “Man-made structures have an aura because they have been fabricated using physical materials that God created in the spirit world. The disruption around all physical objects is similar to a magnetic field. The field is normally invisible, but the magnetic draw is always present.”

  “Just as magnets are drawn together when their opposite poles are positioned towards each other, the physical, which had its origin in the spiritual, is compulsively drawn back towards the spiritual. The pull of physical against spiritual causes a disruption in the fabric, and it’s this disruption that I see as an aura.”

  “When June was getting sicker, the pull of her physical existence towards her spiritual creation point was growing ever stronger, thus creating a bigger disruption in the fabric and causing me to perceive that her aura was growing.”

  Elle seemed fascinated by my new understanding of spirit versus physical and was particularly interested by my interpretation of the consciousness being the soul of the soul, and she thought I was a genius for dreaming it up; I resisted the urge to tell her that I’d had millions of years to come up with the theory…or perhaps only seconds.

  As Elle and I sat beneath the great willow, passing the day, mourning the loss of June, I was filled with conflicting emotions.

  I had grieved for June in Hell, for countless centuries, but was still filled with grief for my loss. I was simultaneously filled with joy. Joie de Vivre, as Miss Lilly might have said, ‘the joy of living.’

  I am fairly certain that unless a person has spent an eternity suffering in the darkest pits of Hell, they will never be able to appreciate just how amazing and wonderful life can be, wi
th its moments of simple pleasure, like a sunset shared with a lover, and its bitter losses, such as the death of a friend.

  As the day waned, and the sun began to set in the western sky I silently thanked my mother for the opportunity she had given me to live once again. My own selfish mother who, during her life was never able to honestly care for anyone but herself, who would have gladly sacrificed a busload of orphaned children if it meant she could get something she wanted, had sacrificed more than just her life to grant me another chance at life.

  My mother had sacrificed her very existence! She surrendered her existence to the void. All the energy that was once her consciousness she transferred to me, in order to return a life force to me.

  Her consciousness no longer exists in any realm; not Heaven, Earth, or Hell. She sacrificed more than anybody could be expected to sacrifice in an attempt to atone for her sins of selfishness while she had been alive.

  Understanding my mother’s sacrifice, understanding the sacrifice that Elle had made in delaying her walk to the other side, understanding the sacrifices that June had made—staying alive through unimaginable torment when she could have let go of her physical tether at any time—in order to ensure that I would graduate and have a happy and prosperous life, I felt bitterly ashamed of my little stunt at the upstairs window.

  Perhaps my trip to Hell had not had anything to do with conscious suicide after all, but instead had much more to do with the ungrateful and selfish heart that was beating blackly in my dark chest at the moment I chose to jump.

  So many sacrifices had been for me, by so many people, and I had looked away from all of them and had, in all reality, spit on their sacrifices and chose the path of darkness instead.

  I suppose I deserved the Hell that I had been thrust into, and I quietly dedicated my new life to ensuring that I would never again follow a path of selfishness but would instead live unswervingly for others, whether they were alive or dead.