by Ben Stevens
I, Hell (COLLECTED STORIES OF HORROR & SUSPENSE Vol. I)
I, Hell
The Mannequin
50, Berkeley Square
Buried Alive
Silent Screaming Face
The Bar
The Devourer of Men
The Burning House
Tokyo Zombie Apocalypse
I, Hell
1
So this was Hell.
Wish to fuck I’d taken those Sunday School Bible classes a bit more seriously. Turns out it was all true, after all…
What can I say? One minute I was strapped in Ol’ Sparky, cussing down the priest they’d brought in to give me the last rites as a fraud and a charlatan… Then ZAP! BANG! BOOM! and I’m writhing -and-a-crappin’-in-my-pants as 2,450 volts shoot through my body.
And then I was in Hell. Must’ve died and shot straight on down through the Earth’s crust – or wherever the Hell it is that, well, Hell’s located.
Sure was a lot of screaming, wailing and general noise. Also heat. A heat so intense it almost seared the flesh from your bones. It bounced off the red rocks all around and seemed to cook your eyes. We emerged out of a little entrance in this immense rock-face, all us newbies. One after the other, stark-naked and scared shitless. Starting even at this early stage to get the idea that this was it – for all eternity. We’d screwed up big-time in our Earthly existence (and I’ll come to just what I’d gone and done shortly), and now it was payback time.
Oh boy, was it just. As I say, there was heat, rocks and screaming. One hundred million million (or thereabouts) naked souls toiling at these never-ending, mile-high rock-faces with pickaxes and such. No point to the work (I’d find that out soon enough) – but this was Hell, right? Providing a feeling of job satisfaction for Hell’s inhabitants wasn’t exactly top of Satan’s list of priorities.
No, we just chipped away at the rock. Got whipped by the flying demons – sure were plenty of those – and periodically taken away for a bit of torture. Only really happened to the newbies, though, ‘cause once you’d been in Hell awhile your face kind of got known, and so it wasn’t worth the demons’ while tormenting you, as opposed to someone who’d just rocked up and so hadn’t a clue concerning what was what.
The first few months I kind of got picked on. It’s like in those movies when the young punk first goes to prison and so really has to look out for his ass. Well, that never happened to me. Though I still got the pitchfork and heated-poker treatment, which is I guess a whole lot worse. Believe me, everything you see in those medieval pictures of Hell – it’s all true, and it all happens.
Yeah, those flying demons – pitch-black bodies, shiny red eyes, huge bat-like wings – had me howling and shrieking like a lost soul. Which is exactly what I was, come to think of it. Pathetic. Should have just kept my mouth shut and let them get bored. They sawed off my legs a few times with a rusty saw; disemboweled me with a blunt knife… It kind of went on until, weirdly, it just started not to hurt so much, and I didn’t scream so loudly. I mean, after they’d had their fun, I’d somehow be whole and intact again, and so I started to get bored with the tortures as much as they did.
I think the demons realized that I was getting used to the whole torture gig – as strange as that may sound – and so they just left me alone. I’d gotten in with a few other damned souls, had myself a little gang, so I was kind of beginning to figure out what was what. Yeah, those demons got bored with me, and so flew off to find themselves some fresh meat.
Incidentally, when I said that I got bullied for the ‘first few months’, you can take that literally. In Hell (damn straight you need the capital ‘H’), you may be in for all eternity, but that doesn’t mean that time passes any more differently than it does when you’re on the good ol’ planet E.A.R.T.H.
No sir. There’s no nighttime here – and you don’t sleep in any case – but time passes exactly the same as it does when you’re alive. Only then you can look forward to – what? Seventy, eighty years? Just supposing you eat right, don’t get a tobacco habit, get your exercise and such?
Here you get to live for millions of years. More than that, in fact – for forever and ever, amen. So if immortality’s your thing, just do a few things wrong and we’ll see you down here! There’s always room, trust me. Hell just goes on and on and on and on and on. An eternity of blistering hot rock faces and millions upon millions of damned souls toiling away at them, engaged in the pointless work. You’re also tortured by endless thirst and hunger – although, to be honest, once you’ve been forced by demons to eat your own scrotum a few times, being perpetually hungry and thirsty really isn’t that much of a big deal. You’d be amazed at how much you can grow to bear. I’ll say that much for Hell – it certainly toughens you up.
As I say, I’d got in by now with a few other denizens of Hell. Most of them were just men and women like me – people who’d been ‘bad eggs’ (to put it politely) in their life on Earth, and so’d been sent down here once they’d croaked for whatever reason.
But once in a while you came across a serious badass. Someone who made even whatever you’d done not look like so much of a big deal. Someone like Adolf Hitler, for example, who was the person I found myself toiling at a rock face with only two or three months after I first arrived in Hell.
‘Heil Hitler!’ I said to him as a joke, the first time I saw him. Like the rest of us, he was stark naked, and still had in place that infamous moustache. But his physique, at least, was well-developed from the near-seventy years he’d already been down here. Even after just a couple of months, all that round-the-clock swinging of the pickaxe was starting to do wonders for my own, previously weedy figure.
‘Yah, yah,’ returned Hitler, shaking his head with vexation. ‘You think I haven’t heard that, like, so many times before?’
(Here, I should say that everyone speaks the same language in Hell. You open your mouth and whatever you want to say just kind of comes out. You hear the same way. So I was originally speaking in English; Hitler was originally talking in German. But somehow we both understood each other instantly.)
‘Okay, guess that was a bit lame,’ I returned, sweating, stinking and burnt as I wielded my pickaxe. (Never try slackening off in Hell, incidentally – those demons with their bloody whips will be on you quicker than flies on shit.)
Hitler seemed to appreciate my veiled apology.
‘You’re new here, huh?’ he said.
‘Damn straight – just a couple of months or so,’ I returned.
‘What did you do?’ Hitler asked.
‘To be honest, I’d rather not say just now,’ I replied. ‘I wish I hadn’t done it – not just because I’m here – but I got a bit carried away. I was a drug and alcohol addict, you see.’
‘Yes,’ nodded Hitler seriously. ‘Those are bad vices. But no doubt you have heard that I was a non-smoking, teetotal vegetarian?’
Plus you started a world war, and tried to exterminate an entire fucking race, you nutcase I thought, but kept my face impassive as I carelessly replied –
‘Yeah, I heard something like that, anyway.’
‘Well, I still am,’ said Hitler proudly. Like there was some store nearby, where the Fuhrer could run off to get himself some beers, a packet of smokes and a hotdog, if he was so tempted. Everyone here – X hundred-damn-million of us – was non-smoking, non-drinking, non-eating.
There was no other way.
Anyway, I got to hanging around with Hitler. It was just a ridiculous chance that I’d got to meet him, given all the millions upon millions of other souls that are here in Hell, but we kind of got on. That is, I let him rant away, whereas some of the other nudists nearby either slipped away to a different rock face, or pleaded for the Fuhrer to shut the fuck up.
Me, I didn’t care. Yeah, I’d slipped up, done some bad shit and so ended up in this place. Still I thought Hitler had been one of the most evil bastards ever, which made it seem slightly unfair that I now had to toil for an eternity alongside him. But that, you might say, is life. Well – actually definitely not life, but you see what I’m getting at.
As I say, Hitler liked to rant. Cussing down his generals a storm for letting him down at the end of the war, and such. If he told me once how he could have won the war if he’d only been surrounded by the right people, ‘instead of damn cowards and fools’, he told me a thousand times.
He informed me that he’d once crossed paths with Joseph Stalin, who was – surprise, surprise – also down here. That seemed to me to be too much of a coincidence – and Hitler thought the same. He was of the opinion that Satan (more on the Big Boss himself later) had set up that meeting, just to cause himself a bit of fiendish amusement.
But – ‘He had nothing to say to me, and I certainly had nothing to say to him,’ declared Hitler petulantly, perspiring as he slammed the point of the pickaxe into the rock-face, sparks and tiny bits of rock flying everywhere. ‘We just ignored each other.’
He was curious about Pol Pot, whom he’d not met but had heard a lot about from some of the others down here. What exactly (Hitler wanted to know) had this Pol Pot done that was so impressive?
I struggled a bit remembering my history; but once upon a time, I’d been a diligent high school student, and so a few things came back to me.
‘He was this whacko leader of a country called Cambodia, in Asia. He tortured and killed – well, I don’t know how many people. Maybe a third of Cambodia’s total population.’
‘And?’ said Hitler, with a sarcastic shrug of his shoulders. ‘That’s it? That’s what the big deal is?’
Clearly, being in Hell almost seven decades hadn’t mellowed the Fuhrer in any way, shape or form. He was still very competitive in what you might call the ‘genocidal maniac stakes’, and prone to fits of jealousy if anyone talked about anyone else who’d also upped what you might call the ‘evil ante’ – Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and such.
‘I nearly changed the entire world order!’ Hitler would sometimes almost scream, like he was addressing his SS troops back in the day. ‘What did these men do, to rival that?’
I have to say, looking at it that way, he had a point.
I said earlier that I’d become part of a ‘little gang’. Well, Hitler was a member of that – I guess the actual leader, if only on strength of personality – but as for the others…
There’s actually not really that much to say. Just quiet men and women who’d done bad things, and seemed to like to be in the company of the Fuhrer. For all his faults, Hitler was a very clever man, and I think he found in me a good listener and – occasional, given his frequent ranting – conversation partner. So the other rapists, murderers, arsonists, child molesters, serial adulterers and such just kind of listened in, with varying degrees of fascination.
There was one thing that had caught my interest, as first the months and then the years went by and I kind of got used to being in Hell. At first you’re too busy being tortured, and with screaming and begging for mercy, to notice too much except for the scorching heat, the red sky and the endless rock faces. Then you find out a bit about the pecking order around you, who’s who, who’s got some interesting stories to tell and who’s a boring asshole – that kind of thing.
But then you settle down, and start to pay attention to the details. Which is when I really noticed – I mean really saw for the first time – the small cave located relatively nearby, way up in the rock face.
Obviously, I say ‘nearby’ in relation to where I was, but I suspect that for anyone in Hell this small cave appears ‘nearby’. Distance and such things are all distorted and relative in this place.
Yeah, there was definitely an opening of some kind in the rock face. The only opening I could see anywhere, in fact, other than the one right at ground-level that was continually disgorging the nude, bewildered new entrants to Hell.
Eventually I pointed it out to ‘Nazi-boy’ – which was what I’d taken to calling Herr Hitler on occasion, much to his displeasure. Sometimes he’d scream some vitriol at me, and refuse to engage in any conversation for a few days. Once, he managed to stay in a sulk almost two weeks. (I’d told him that he’d demonstrated total idiocy in not invading England when he had the chance in 1940 – like I say, I knew my history pretty well.)
But that day, as I asked Hitler if he knew what that small cave or whatever it was high up in the rock face actually was, he gave a slight, conceited smile.
‘I was wondering when you’d ask me that,’ he said.
One of the jet-black, winged demons with the red eyes flew overhead, and we quickly made it look as though we were working hard. When the thing had passed – and I’ll say exactly what their story was in a while – I said to Hitler:
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone always notices that small cave, sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I noticed it within the first year of being here – I mean, started to realize that it had some significance, beyond it just being a hole in the rock face.’
Naturally, Hitler had to get it in that he’d taken real notice of that hole in the rock face quicker than I had. I wondered if this was part of the fabled ‘small man’ complex; and then realized that for all shorter-than-average men who aren’t actually homicidal maniacs resident in Hell, this thought wasn’t exactly fair.
‘Okay, okay – well done you,’ I said, barely keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. ‘Now, if you’d care to enlighten me…’
It was only now that I saw Hitler look almost sad, as he gazed way up at that small opening. His icy-blue eyes were strangely wistful, and the thin upper lip below the moustache (by the way – for whatever reason, nothing like nails or hair ever grows in Hell) trembled slightly.
‘Through there is freedom and salvation,’ he said quietly.
‘What?’ I returned, not knowing in the slightest what he meant.
‘Through there is… is…’
‘Yes?’
‘I can’t say that word aloud,’ he said in a stage whisper. ‘Do I have to spell it out – it begins with an ‘H’...’
‘You mean – Heaven?’ I gasped in disbelief.
Instantly, Hell sort of shook slightly. The winged demons flying overhead made a terrible roaring noise, like bulls. A shrieking arose from the massed ranks of the damned laboring at the never-ending rock faces.
‘Idiot!’ said Hitler. ‘That’s blasphemy of the highest order! You’re for it now!’
Was I just... A winged demon came and grabbed me with its claws and took me to that place. The one with all the saws and manacles and pincers and pokers and flames and screams and cries… Pretty soon I, too, was howling the place down – even after one demon cut out my tongue, and there standing in front of me swallowed it down and rubbed its stomach as though in delight. Then I couldn’t see any more, because they put out my eyes with those heated pokers.
I just screamed for days…
Then, finally intact again and back at the rock face, the nightmare over at least on this occasion, Hitler looked at me, smirked and shook his head.
‘You won’t do that again,’ he observed.
‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘I won’t. But – that cave up there, that really does lead to…?’
Hitler shrugged.
‘So I was told, and everyone else here. Of course, we had to read a bit between the lines to figure it out – we didn’t just go and shout out the word…’
‘Yeah, yeah, all right,’ I sighed, swinging my pickaxe into the rock face. Every blow – received twenty-four hours a day, 365-days a year – painfully jarred my sweaty body and arms. But at least everyone in Hell – men, women and children – was in the same boat, so to speak.
‘But – what if someone were to climb up there, and…’
Hitler sig
hed and shook his head.
‘You’ve been here for several years – why do you think?’
It was obvious, now I properly thought about it.
‘It’s a Hell –ha! ‘Scuse me – it’s a long, long way up, steep and jagged. Then I guess one of those flying demons would pull you down, soon as they realized what you were up to…’
Hitler shrugged.
‘Well, yes,’ he mused. ‘It’s been a long time since anyone has tried climbing up there – though there have been a few even in the short time I’ve been here.’
‘Short?’ I echoed.
‘Relatively speaking, yes,’ returned Hitler. ‘I mean, I’ll have to be here for a long, long time before I’ve any chance of becoming a demon, for example…’
I’d never realized, until he said this, that that was his intention.
‘You serious?’ I said quietly.
‘Absolutely,’ nodded Hitler. ‘You have to look forward and aim for something, even in this place.’
I found myself admiring his positive attitude. If you could stay upbeat in Hell, you had to be something of a tough cookie.
‘But anyway,’ he quickly continued, ‘such a thing is many, many years off yet. There is a rumor that Genghis Khan was in Hell long enough to become a demon – but some say even that length of time (I mean from when he died until recently) is not long enough. To become so evil that the transformation can take place – so that there is not even a shred of goodness, of basic humanity left in you. That takes a good while, even in Hell – even for someone like me. You? I suspect you’ll have to wait many, many millennia.’
‘Look… wait…’ I stammered, trying desperately to comprehend all I was hearing. ‘We were talking about that small cave… Why it’s there…’
‘Don’t you get it?’ hissed Hitler suddenly. ‘It’s just another torture. It’s a passageway to you-know-where, if you can get up there… But you never will. Sometimes the demons even let you try and climb, because they know you’ll fall long before you reach the cave.’
Yeah – it was one of those climbs that look faintly possible at first… But soon you saw the distance between two rocks (vertically or horizontally) was just slightly too long, or the going just a bit too steep… Not enough to discourage the truly desperate (i.e. the odd person here in Hell), but enough to suggest to a person in possession of a relatively balanced mind that the whole thing was hopeless from the start.
