Inferno- Go to Hell

by Scott Reeves

  Someone nearby, lost in their own torment, lashed out, smacking her in the face. Stunned, she sank beneath the surface. But she didn’t sink far. The density of the lava wouldn’t allow it. Also, as she sank down, her foot hit the bottom of the lake. So it wasn’t very deep. Not that she thought along such lines anymore. Pain would not allow it.

  She bobbed back to the surface and gasped for air. The air raced down her lungs, scorching her bronchioles. Pain. That was her universe now. Every little movement, every little breath, every second that passed, was agony.

  Something in the lake brushed her ankle. Something slimy, something soft. A massive tentacle briefly rose from the lava far out in the lake, dripping molten gobs, and then sank back into the depths. Ripples of displaced lava from the tentacle’s movement swept across her, pushing her toward the rocky shelf. Her pain-numbed mind felt a lessening of the heat in that direction, and she instinctively thrashed toward it, like a moth drawn toward light. She scrabbled at the rock, trying to haul herself out. She almost succeeded.

  But a bony foot smashed into her face and she reeled backward amidst the thrashing bodies and sank beneath the lava, momentarily stunned into merciful unconsciousness.

  When she came to, she was floating on her back, buoyed by the lava. Her feet dangled downward into the depths as her mind and body burned. She simply let herself drift. What was the point in fighting it? This was her new existence, and she surrendered to it.

  She was well and truly damned.

  Something grabbed an ankle and tugged her downward. She didn’t resist. Let me drown, she begged in her mind. Oh, please God, let me die!

  She sank beneath the lava.

  Despite her wish to die, instinct kicked in and she held her breath. She was pulled through the lava, completely immersed, screaming silently. The molten rock sluiced past her. She felt rock scrape along her skin, on different sides: she was being pulled through a tunnel beneath the lake. She started convulsing, desperate for air but fighting the urge to draw a breath. The grip on her ankle tightened, and then something gripped her other ankle as well.

  She was hauled upward and out of the lava. Hands brushed lava away from her skin as she drew in great heaving breaths. The pain receded, and as her mind cleared and conscious thought eased back in, she became aware of her surroundings.

  She was in a dimly lit cavern, lying next to a bubbling pool of lava.

  A fairly attractive naked woman knelt over her. Next to the woman was Nigel, nearly unrecognizable in his hairless, naked state, but definitely Nigel. His face was fraught with concern. They were both covered with steaming gobs of molten rock.

  “Where am I?” Paula croaked.

  CHAPTER TEN – Pain Purifies the Mind

  JASON FOLLOWED DIABOLUS up the sloping path to the narrow ledge that overlooked the hellish cavern. From that high vantage point, he could see how immense the cavern truly was. It must have been a good mile in diameter and a hundred feet tall, and filled entirely with bubbling lava in which untold thousands writhed and shrieked in agony, boiling alive, unable to die. The circular shelf down at the lava level ran the entire circumference of the cavern, providing a stable point from which the winged creatures could guard the damned mass of humanity.

  In the ceiling near the center of the cavern were the dark openings, possibly airshafts that siphoned off the heat, smoke and noxious gasses that filled the air.

  Jason took a ragged breath. The air scalded his lungs, singed his bronchioles. Even breathing was an agony, in this place.

  Behind him, Diabolus stood in the opening of a tunnel. The towering red-skinned man allowed Jason a brief moment to survey the cavern, and then commanded, “Come. Now.”

  Jason turned and followed the man into the tunnel. He wondered: was Diabolus a man? Freakishly tall, with that strange red skin and a dangling manhood that would have put a porn star to shame... Was he a man, or some sort of demon?

  Jason’s faith in science had been shattered by this place. For a moment, he actually considered that the man might be Satan himself. But only for a moment.

  The tunnel was wide and well lit by the bioluminescent fungus they’d encountered before. Diabolus strode with authority, and the winged creatures they passed crouched obsequiously close to the ground.

  They even passed a few humans—a man and two women—who prostrated themselves as Diabolus strode past. They were completely naked, and they looked at Jason with curious eyes. At first, Jason felt a faint glimmer of hope upon seeing them. Not being in the lava, they were potential allies. But right on the heels of that hope was the suspicion that if they weren’t in the lava, then they must be allies of Diabolus and the winged creatures, and, thus, his enemies.

  They passed numerous side tunnels and darkened rooms. The air grew a bit cooler, a bit less oppressive, the further they got from the hellish cavern.

  Finally Diabolus stopped outside a door-shaped opening and motioned for Jason to precede him. Despite the bleakness that had settled into his soul, Jason experienced a brief flash of humor. Politeness from the Devil?

  Inside the room was a huge wooden table much like the one they’d found in the kitchen, higher up in the mine and in simpler times, when their only problem had been finding a way out. Had that only been a day ago? Two days? How long had they been down here? He felt a momentary sense of disorientation. What time was it? When had he last slept?

  On the tabletop were about a dozen plates, each filled with a quivering, jiggling mass of something which Jason supposed must be what passed for food in this place. He looked closely. Dead snails. A slimy, shifting mass of pale worms. Fungus.

  Fish, too. So there was a lake down here somewhere, or a river.

  There were two empty plates at either end of the table. A wooden cup filled with black liquid sat beside each plate. Bending over, Jason sniffed the nearest cup. It smelled like urine and skunk.

  There were two wooden benches along either side of the table. Diabolus motioned for Jason to sit, and he did so. Then the tall man seated himself.

  Diabolus smiled. His teeth were chipped and stained, a few missing altogether. He motioned to the items on the table. “You must be very hungry. Eat. Indulge yourself.”

  Jason goggled at the man. “What, are you kidding?”

  Diabolus cocked his head. “‘Kidding’? I’m not familiar with that expression.”

  “It means,” Jason said, “that I will starve to death before I eat any of this disgusting stuff.”

  “This is the finest food we have to offer.” Diabolus picked up the cup next to his plate and swirled the dark liquid around. “You have better on the surface?” He took a drink of the foul-smelling stuff.

  Anger surged in Jason. This was ridiculous. Mike, Paula and Stacy were boiling alive nearby, and this fool wanted to have a polite dinner with him? Jason leapt up, overturning the bench. He flung his hand along the table, sweeping half the dishes onto the floor, where they shattered. “Fuck you!” he shouted. “Who are you? What is this place? Let my friends go!”

  Two of the winged creatures skittered into the room and tackled him, pinning him to the ground. Stingers curled high, threatening.

  Diabolus clapped his hands. “Let him up.”

  The creatures released Jason and skittered back out the door where, presumably, they stood guard in the tunnel beyond.

  Jason got to his feet, glaring at Diabolus.

  “Anger is a sin,” Diablous said. “Patience is a virtue.” He motioned to the overturned bench. “Sit. If you don’t want to eat, at least be my guest while I do.”

  Jason fumed. He did need information. And as long as he wasn’t in the lava, he might be able to rescue his friends. Pissing off his captors was the quickest way to make sure that didn’t happen. Calming himself, he righted the bench and sat back down on it.

  “Thank you.” Diabolus scooped up a handful of worms from one of the plates. “You’re wondering who we are. I will tell you.” He tilted his head back and dropped the worms into
his mouth. As he chewed, he said, “We were chased down here in the year of our lord nine hundred sixty-five by knights in service to the Peaceable King Edgar. They had branded us heretics and blasphemers. But it is they who are the blasphemers. To live is to blaspheme against God.”

  “Back up a minute,” Jason said. “Are you claiming that you’re over a thousand years old?”

  Diablous shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous. When I say ‘we,’ I’m obviously referring to my ancestors, to the ancestors of all the people down here.” He chuckled into his cup. “A thousand years old, indeed!”

  Jason reddened. Winged creatures who breathed fire and a giant man with red skin were holding him captive in a place where people were burned alive but didn’t die, and this man had the nerve to ridicule him for thinking he might be a thousand years old? “Fuck you,” Jason spat.

  “An interesting phrase,” Diabolus said. “You use so many interesting words.” He popped a few snails into his mouth, which made disgustingly juicy popping noises as he chewed, the snails exploding in his mouth. “As I was saying, Edgar’s knights drove us down here. You see, the Beast had called to my ancestor from deep beneath the Earth, and he brought our people down. Way down. The knights sealed the door behind us, and we dug down, down, further down than we are now. Further down than you can possibly imagine, straight down to the Beast. Right where we wished to be. Trapped inside by the knights, of course, but make no mistake: right where we wished to be.”

  Diabolus spoke no more, letting his final words dangle in the air like bait as he chewed worms and sipped the foul-smelling black liquid.

  Jason tried to ignore the baited words, but curiosity finally got the better of him. “All right,” he sighed. “Why is this right where you wished to be?”

  Diabolus smiled. The area around his mouth was flecked with bits of worm and snail. He wiped the detritus away with the back of his arm. Then he stood. “Walk with me, and I will show you why.” He strode to the door and then through without a backward glance, confident that Jason would follow.

  Jason hesitated for a moment before deciding that defiance was in neither his best interest nor that of his friends. So he stood and followed Diabolus.

  The giant man led him through a warren of tunnels, taking so many twists and turns that Jason doubted he’d be able to find his way back to the hellish cavern, in the unlikely event he managed to escape Diabolus and elude the two skittering winged things that escorted them.

  Soon, up ahead, screams began to rip through the air. The agonized shrieks grew louder, and Jason wondered if they were returning to the lava cavern. But no: he could still hear faint screams far behind them, overpowered by the screams up ahead. Wherever they were going, it wasn’t back to the hellish lava cavern.

  Jason and Diabolus wended their way through a crowd of nude men and women strolling the tunnels. As before, every single one of them made gestures of submission toward Diabolus, some merely nodding their heads and saluting, others dropping to the ground and prostrating themselves.

  Diabolus indicated the tunnel walls. In a conversational tone, he said to Jason, “These tunnels, indeed this entire complex, is impressive, is it not? Imagine the effort, spread across the centuries, to hew these passages into the very bowels of the Earth! Surely you can appreciate the magnitude of what we’ve accomplished here?”

  The tunnel ended in a dark opening up ahead. The screams grew louder as they drew closer, and Jason shuddered as the agony in the shrieks touched a sympathetic nerve within him.

  Diabolus studied Jason, evidently expecting a response to his comment.

  Jason shrugged. This place was impressive. Nightmarishly impressive. But he’d be damned if he was going to admit that to this beast of a man. “Not really. Such massive undertakings are entirely common in the world.”

  Diabolus chuckled. “Really? Oh, how I long to see the surface world. I can only imagine the wonders that have been accomplished in the centuries we’ve been down here.”

  They came to the opening at the end of the tunnel and stepped through into a new nightmare.

  The room was an enormous cavern, almost as large as the fiery cavern where his friends even now burned in forced damnation. But there was no sea of lava in here. Even so, burning alive might be preferable to what he saw in this cavern.

  Spread across the cavern floor as far as the eye could see was every sort of torture device that had ever been conceived by man. Or at least he supposed so; he had never actually studied the history of torture. But as far as he could tell, this cavern sported a complete inventory of devices for inflicting pain.

  There were racks upon which a spread-eagled man could be stretched until his muscles tore and his bones separated. There were beds of nails. There were casks lined with nails into which a man could be placed, and once the lid was shut, he would be skewered on all sides. There were devices for water boarding. There were devices he didn’t even recognize, contraptions consisting of razor-thin wires and coils and sharp needles and rusty shackles.

  And they were all in use. Men and women lay inside the infernal devices as winged creatures attended them, inflicting pain. Here, a man shrieked as a winged thing turned a crank, stretching the man out, his joints snapping and popping. There, a woman lay twisting in agony as one of the winged devils used pincers to pull up her fingernails, one by one. And over there, a man howled as one of the beasts tightened a vice on the man’s testicles. The man’s howling was soon drowned out as his mouth erupted with vomit.

  Perhaps most disturbing of all, Jason noted that there were numerous children scattered throughout the room. Some of them couldn’t have been much older than ten. And of everyone he could see, the oldest seemed several years younger than Jason, who, in his early twenties, was barely an adult himself.

  Even as Jason watched, young men and women pushed past him into the room. They headed for empty devices, presenting themselves to the device’s attendant, as though reporting for work.

  Jason whirled from the room, spewing his own eruption of vomit onto the tunnel walls. Since he hadn’t eaten in a while, the stuff was mostly watery bile, but it tasted vile nonetheless.

  Diabolus stood by impassively, watching Jason.

  “What the hell,” Jason coughed when his stomach had finished heaving. “What the hell is this place?”

  Diabolus’s laughter rumbled through the tunnel. “I believe your question supplies its own answer.”

  Jason gaped as more people streamed past him, heading into the torture chamber. Others came out, dripping blood or covered with bruises, eyes dazed and streaming with tears. These latter limped away, presumably headed to... to where? To some darkened cranny they called home? How could anywhere be home in a miserable place like this?

  “These people willingly submit to this,” Jason said. It wasn’t a question, but a statement of utter disbelief.

  “Of course,” Diabolus said.

  “But... why?”

  “Because they exist. If a man breathes, he sins. Man is a fallen creature. His every thought is a sin. The mind of man is an abomination to God. Every one of us down here, we know this. And so we submit to suffering, in carefully administered doses. Pain purifies the mind. A body in pain houses a mind that cannot be tempted by sin. Torture drives away thought, and with it, sin. Hell is not a place of punishment. It is a place of redemption, of reconciliation with God.”

  Jason wiped the last traces of vomit from his mouth. “You’re insane,” he spat.

  “You are mistaken,” Diabolus said. “It is you who are insane. Your sinful mind has driven you to insanity. The only time a man is completely sane and without sin is when he suffers. Sin is the insanity of a fallen mind, and torture is the cure.”

  Hearing that, Jason half-expected to be hauled away into the torture chamber so he could be “cured.”

  But Diabolus merely gestured for Jason to follow. “Come. There is more that I would show you.”

  He strode back up the tunnel away from th
e torture room. Jason followed, his steps heavy with trepidation over what new horror he was about to be shown.

  PAULA SAT ALONGSIDE the bubbling pool of lava in the hidden cavern. She stared anxiously into the churning, molten rock, anxiously looking for signs that someone was surfacing.

  Nigel had been gone for a long time. How could anyone, even Nigel, bear the pain of being submerged in the lava for so long? Surely he had lost his mind to the pain, and even now bobbed amidst the boiling masses, all knowledge of his mission subsumed into a haze of pain. He had assured her that his life of discipline and self-control had prepared him for this, and that he would find Mike and Stacy with no problems. He’d been born to lead these people from this hell, he claimed, and that’s exactly what he would do.

  But Paula had her doubts.

  She looked at Siri, who knelt on the opposite side of the pool. “He’ll be back,” Siri assured her, as if reading her thoughts. “Have faith. God has sent Nigel to deliver us all.”

  As soon as Siri had finished speaking, Mike’s head erupted from the lava. His face was twisted in a ghastly rictus as he screamed at the top of his lungs. Paula gasped and reached out, grabbing hold of his body as it emerged from the lava, pushed from below by Nigel. She dragged at him, her hands slipping on his naked skin. In a matter of seconds she had laid him out on the bare rock alongside the pool. She wiped at the steaming lava that caked his body, flinging great gobs of it away and wincing in pain as it burned her hands.

  While Paula was occupied with Mike, Siri helped Nigel from the pool. He was remarkably calm and controlled for someone who had just spent what seemed eternity swimming through molten rock.

  Mike sucked in great heaving gasps of air, his screams of pain dying as he realized he was no longer burning. He looked around, his eyes wild as he viewed the world through a haze of receding pain. Paula loomed above him, smiling down in profound relief that they were together again.

  As Mike recovered, Nigel rested briefly. He was obviously exhausted, and however well he repressed it, the memory of unimaginable pain haunted his eyes. But soon he stood and said in a trembling voice, “I’ll go after Stacy now. If she’s still about where she fell, she should be near the center of the lake.”