I, Hell

by Ben Stevens

Maybe I was hallucinating. No, not hallucinating, given that I was in absolute pitch darkness and couldn’t see a fucking thing… Calm, I told myself. Calm calm calm. Hearing voices – that was the one. Maybe I was just doing that…

  No. I couldn’t escape reality whichever way I attempted to turn my mind. This voice was real. And I’d been buried alive. End of story.

  ‘I don’t hear you talking, Writer Man,’ taunted the Voice. ‘You better start telling a story, real soon.’

  ‘’The fuck!’ I yelled, my voice catching with a sob. I was dangerously close to hysteria again, regardless of how much I was trying to tell myself to keep calm.

  ‘Tell a story – the story of your life,’ said the Voice. ‘Else I turn off your air supply.’

  There must be a tube going into this coffin, down by my feet, I thought distantly. There by the small speaker that was transmitting this fucker’s voice.

  ‘Why’d you leave me the knife?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know… perhaps you can weave that into your narrative. After all, this story must end one way or the other…’

  It was down to me to figure out what the guy meant by that, I guessed. Like maybe I’d wind up taking my own life, driven to suicide at having been buried underground in a –

  Wait.

  Who said I was in fact underground? In a coffin, almost certainly – but actually buried…?

  A tiny bit of hope filled me. Just a slither. And yet that was enough. I’d been in tough situations before – like I say, it was only these past four years or so I’d considered myself living – and I’d got out of those. So maybe I’d get out of this. ‘Specially as this dumb fucker had left me with a knife…

  ‘Still nothing…’ said the Voice.

  Strangely enough, exciting plots with strong characters weren’t exactly crowding my mind at the present time. Though if I didn’t start talking soon, I’d never talk again.

  But there was one story I could tell.

  Yeah, there was one. After all, the Voice had ordered me to tell the ‘story of my life’. Guess I’d take him at his word. I’ve always been a literal kind of guy, in any case.

  And while I was telling this story, I’d see if I couldn’t get my way out of this coffin.

  As I got the knife out of my pocket, I started talking. Real loud – loud enough maybe to conceal what I also now took to doing...

  4

  I was once a bad man. Not real bad – a murderer, rapist, pedophile or such – but bad enough. What you might call real mean. And I got even meaner when I was drunk. Which was most of the time.

  Yeah, soon as I took my first sip of that beer in my teens, I was in trouble. Some people just ain’t made for drinking. And I was one of them – still am, come to that. ‘Cause even though I haven’t touched a drop these past four years, I’ll still always be one of them there ‘alcoholics’.

  You getting all this, buddy?

  The town where I was born, raised and still live (if I ever get back there) is a rough kind of place. It breeds hard men and women. Main industry is logging, in the woods that surround the town on three sides. Go too far into the woods and you’ll get lost and no one will ever see you again. Best way of giving you an idea ‘bout how large these woods are is to tell how, last year, a chartered Learjet crash-landed somewhere in them – and they’re still searching for the wreckage now. That’s how large the woods are. They can swallow plenty, and hold onto it for a real long time.

  But on what you might call the ‘outskirts’ of these great woods, men are employed cutting down trees. That’s what I grew up to do, same as my father and his father before him. Learned how to use the chainsaw and the axe so to make the tree fall in a certain way – the way I and the team I was on wanted it to. No room for error in this job; make a mistake and maybe you’ll be missing a few fingers, your hand or foot. Maybe you’ll just be dead, crushed by several tons of hard falling wood. I’ve seen it happen. Weeping widows and fatherless kids at funerals. Like I say, it’s a hard environment for all concerned.

  It was a job I was good at. Back then, no matter how bad the hangover, I was still the best man on my team. That ain’t arrogance. Just fact. I gave the orders, and the men around me followed them. If they didn’t do exactly what I said – and real quick – then there was trouble. Seemed I was always in a hurry; always looking to get work finished so’s I could get back to drinking in one of the inns about town. It was like work was just some sort of interruption to this activity of consuming alcohol. I didn’t even sleep much; just drank. Guess that was what made my temperament even meaner.

  I had plenty of bar fights. Usually, I caused them. Often ‘cause of that habit I had of spitting in a beer a man had just bought, if I’d run out of money. Or even if I was flush, but just felt like doing it. Like I didn’t like the look of the man, or thought maybe he’d ‘disrespected’ me in some way.

  What a lowdown, sorry piece of stuff I was…

  ‘Well, look at that – you won’t be wanting that drink now. Guess I’d better have it,’ I’d tell ‘em, giving them a smile and the hard stare at the same time. Some men just gave up the glass of beer and left the inn, cutting their losses – but others tried taking a swing at me.

  Their mistake. I never fought by any rules. I hit fast and I hit hard, no matter how intoxicated I was. And I fought dirty. Once I bit a man’s nose almost clean off – they had to sew it back on at the hospital. That earned me a bit of jail-time – my first stint – but I was soon back out, drinking and logging, logging and drinking.

  Some of the inns in town tried banning me, but that never lasted long. They’d call the sheriff to get me, if things got too out of hand. So the sheriff was called out plenty of times.

  ‘You can sleep it off in here, John,’ he’d tell me, putting me in the drunk tank with the plastic mattress. Drunk and mean as I was, I never tried anything on with that man. It wasn’t just the gun and the badge. Or the fact that he was about my own size and build – over six foot, and around two hundred pounds.

  There was just this calmness – I don’t know how else to describe it – about Sheriff Parker. No matter how many times he ran me in, no matter what I’d done, I never saw him get angry in any way.

  ‘One of these days, John, you’re gonna wind up killing someone, the way you’re living,’ he’d tell me, before he shut that cell door once again. He didn’t touch alcohol himself; a clean-living man, devoted to his family, hitting the church pew every Sunday morning.

  Yeah, we were about the same size and build. Even had the same type of haircut. So for Sheriff Parker, looking at me must have been like gazing into some real dirty mirror. Sometimes, I realized this. And it made me drink and fight even harder. But there was a poison – a depression – spreading in me, and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t drown it with alcohol.

  It wasn’t like there was anyone close to me. My parents both died early, and I was an only child. Women came and went – usually they stayed just for the night. Always the same kind of woman, too; the type who’d take whatever money was left in my wallet before letting themselves out of my stinking apartment, while I was still in bed snoring like a hog.

  Well, pointless spinning this part of the story out too long. My drinking just got worse, and worse. Before I’d usually just got beer-drunk, but now I started hitting the hard liqueur. For the first time, I started to miss going into work. I had another bar-fight, knocked a man’s front teeth out and broke his leg, and got a bit more jail time. Then I was back, hitting the bottle worse than ever…

  I wanted to die, Jack – plain and simple.

  17 May, 2008 – that’s one date I’ll never forget. That’s the day I woke up caked in my own filth; I mean, everything. I crawled out to the bathroom and caught my reflection in the mirror. I saw a beast; a pitiful excuse for a human being. I’d hurt plenty of people – but I’d hurt myself most of all. I was a sad, weak creature, regardless of my outward size and strength. No one liked me, and plenty ha
ted me; but no one hated me more than I hated myself right then.

  And it was then I knew that I’d finally come to the end of the wrong road. I couldn’t go any further. It was time to end all this. I left my apartment and headed towards the woods. I’d just go so far in that I’d get lost, or else take a jump off one of the cliffs or gorges you always came across sooner or later…

  Either way, I was determined that this would be my last day alive.

  5

  I couldn’t see what kind of wood the coffin was made from, obviously – but it was hard. Even using my knife, I was making slow progress scratching away at the coffin lid, at the same time as I poured out my life story to whoever the psycho was who had me imprisoned here underground…

  But was I underground? That was what I was determined to find out. It felt good to be doing something; not just lying here in the absolute blackness, passively accepting that I was a prisoner.

  No – I was fighting back.

  Scritch scratch scritch – maybe the Voice could hear what I was doing. Maybe it was even causing him some amusement. The utter futility of it, I mean…

  No – I couldn’t afford to think like that. I had to cling to this one source of hope, no matter how slim it was. Otherwise I was lying in pitch blackness in a coffin – with only this knife as a possible way of ending my torment.

  Yeah, I’d figured that out right – the Voice had just stuck this knife in with me as a way of increasing my torture. He was one sick fucker, all right. I wrote stories that were ‘fast-moving’ and ‘thrilling’ (to quote some words that get used real often in the reviews left by my readers), but I don’t think I could ever have come up with a plot like this.

  ‘No talking,’ said the Voice suddenly.

  My words came out sullen: ‘I’m thirsty – I need a drink. Water.’

  Scritch scratch scritch – could he hear or not?

  ‘Finish your story and…’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Just finish your story – I want to hear why you didn’t kill yourself.’

  My mind cracked again, just like that. Seems I was having spells of strange ‘acceptance’, punctuated by occasional fits of hysteria caused by the utter horror of the situation I was in.

  ‘PLEASE, PLEASE WHY AM I HERE LET ME GO PLEASE’ I begged, my nose running as I began to sob. My knife had penetrated the coffin lid – and some soil immediately fell in on my face, through the small hole I’d managed to make.

  I truly was underground. I’d been buried alive.

  ‘Start talking, Mr. Writer Man,’ said the Voice, through what I knew was a smile. ‘Just keep talking – this story of your life – else the air goes off. You wanna die now?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said in what was little more than a sigh. I lifted up my hand, and tried wiping some of the tears, snot and earth off my face.

  So long as I kept talking, I’d stay alive.

  That was, until the Voice decided that I’d said enough.

  That I knew for a cold, hard fact.

  6

  So I’d decided to die. Just hadn’t quite finalized the details – like exactly how I was going to end it all. As suicidal as I was, I still didn’t really fancy getting lost in those woods and slowly perishing of hunger and thirst. A bit too protracted, that one. Also, taking a jump off a cliff top… Supposing the fall didn’t kill me? Just left my body hopelessly smashed and mangled, and in the most appalling pain…?

  Yeah, even at my lowest ebb, my mind was subconsciously going into survival mode. Rebelling at the instruction the weak, pathetic, violent and alcohol-addicted part of me was giving: Do it. Destroy yourself. Because you’ll never be anything more than what you are now – a mess.

  I’m still not quite sure why it was, but I was ‘bout the only person in my town who didn’t own a gun of some kind. I think, deep down, that I knew if I had owned a gun, I’d wind up shooting someone. And then I’d do some serious jail time – in a federal prison, not just the almost easy-going, county jail joints.

  I thought all this through the murk of what would be my final hangover, that day as I walked into the woods. I avoided the men logging and went ever deeper into the trees. Still knew my way, but sooner or later I’d get lost. Looked like I was choosing the slow way to die, after all.

  Soon enough I heard the rushing of water. It was the river where I’d often come as a boy. In those fleeting, glorious years before I’d become just another slave to the hooch. All us kids had been forbidden to go to the river – it flowed fast, and had claimed a fair few lives over the years – so of course that just made us want to head out there all the more. There were small pools formed by the banks either side, surrounded by rocks, that were good for fishing and bathing. Every so often me and the other boys got found out by our parents – and got the strap from our fathers – but that sure never stopped us none.

  Maybe I’d wade out into the river, I thought now. Just let the power of that rushing water knock me off my feet and carry me under. It was wide, and deep.

  But as I got ever closer to that rushing water, I started thinking I could hear someone yelling. A boy’s voice, pleading for help. I started walking faster – temporarily forgetting my own misery, you might say.

  I emerged out of the trees (I’d been following a narrow but well-worn trail) and there, among the rough grass just before the river, saw a bicycle lying on its side. There was also what looked like a lunch pail, and just by the water’s edge a fishing rod and such.

  The yelling sounded again. I looked down the river and saw who was making the hollering. A boy, somewhere in his mid-teens, who was clinging to a branch that jutted out low from the bank. It looked old and rotten, and sure wasn’t going to take his weight for long. ‘Specially as that rushing water – swollen by recent, heavy rain – was doing its very best just to snatch him right along to a watery grave. His body and arms were stretched out almost straight, his face facing mine. Any second now it looked as though he’d be forced to let go…

  The kid saw me as I started hurrying along the bank towards him. (We were on the same side of the river – that was, you might say, about the one hopeful aspect of this whole damn situation.) Yeah, he saw me, and it sure didn’t do nothing to relieve the fear in his face. For this kid was Sheriff Parker’s boy, who knew like most other people in this town just what a bad-hat I was. He couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t just stretch my leg out and kick him into the water, just ‘cause of who his father was.

  Actually, that last bit wouldn’t have been possible anyway. The branch jutted out almost ten foot, from the base of an old and gnarly tree that grew by the water’s edge. Straight away, I knew that any previous plan I had of creeping along this branch to somehow grab hold of the kid just wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘Help me! Please!’ the boy started screaming. ‘I can’t hold on any longer!’

  I didn’t allow myself to think. Just shucked off my shoes, slid down the bank and I’m in the water. Straight away, it was up to my waist – and Christ, so powerful! (I don’t like to blaspheme, nowadays – but that’s sure what I was thinking at the time.)

  I had to use all the strength in my legs, just so I didn’t get swept away by this water. The mixture of mud and sand at the bottom was treacherous, too. Soft and shifting, just like it wanted to suck you down and under forever… I grabbed hold of weeds, roots and such jutting out from the low bank above the water’s surface, as I slowly – oh-so-slowly – made my way toward the boy.

  All the time the boy’s staring straight at me, eyes fixed in terror. I don’t think he was all that bothered about who I was anymore. He just wanted saving from a watery grave. I moved closer, and closer. Any second I was expecting the branch that boy was holding onto to snap or give way and for him to be snatched away forever by the water.

  I didn’t consciously admit this to myself at the time, but somewhere deep down I knew that if such a thing were to happen to the boy, then I’d let myself get taken away by this river too. So this b
oy’s life was pretty much my own. If fate let me save him, then you could say I’d at least accomplished something worthwhile in my otherwise pretty failed existence.

  ‘Now just hold on there, son… Hold on…’ I was saying all the time as I approached the boy. Getting nearer… and nearer… And then just as the branch started to tear away from the bank I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, my right holding onto a bunch of roots and such. It took all the strength I had to pull the boy towards me, and then to help hoist him up on the river bank.

  There he collapsed, spitting out water and crying, lying on his back and staring up at the blue sky. Pretty soon I’d joined him, my chest heaving with exertion. I had a pretty good feeling; something almost like pride. Can’t say I’d ever really felt that way before.

  ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, turning his head to look at me. ‘Thank you.’

  I slowly sat up.

  ‘Come on, son,’ I told him. ‘Probably best you get checked out down at the hospital.’

  Well, they still talk about the sight of me coming out of the woods with Sheriff Parker’s son. A bunch of men logging were the first to see it, and a couple of them even made to go for me, until the boy poured out what had actually happened to them. They looked surprised, and well they might. John McCullough – a mean, aggressive, no-good drunk – had saved a boy from drowning, there in that river that was feared by every parent locally?

  Wet as I was, I insisted on going right along with the boy to hospital. One of the men gave us a ride in his truck. I sat outside the room while a doctor checked the boy over, with a towel wrapped round me. Then I heard a voice say ‘John’ and I looked up and there was stood Sheriff Parker.

  He cried as he shook my hand. He just kept thanking me. Pretty soon, I was crying too. I just felt so wretched all of a sudden, like I’d done this thing and now what? Go back to drinking and fighting all the time? Have another shot at killing myself?

  ‘Anything I can do for you, John, anything at all,’ Sheriff Parker was saying.