Just to See Hell

by Chandler Morrison

  pink clouds and slinking purple cats on playgrounds under the earth, whispering to each other gently and caressing their ears with their twitching tails and speaking of things only that can be known by those among them, to never be divulged to anyone lest it ruin everyone…to move is TOO MUCH, to interact perhaps equally so, but to SIT and SINK in the dark in COMFORT and in BLISS is the ESSENTIAL ANSWER to the question nagging at everyone’s mind…even the ones who think they’ve figured it out.

  They dragged him across the floor, kicking and beating him, but there was no pain. He looked dazedly about for the devil but saw him nowhere, so he could only wonder with passing disinterest why this

  your sticky corrosive tar is bubbling within my blackening heart, causing it to wither and fester like a gangrenous leprosy sore…you are my bloodshot eyes and I am your pinprick pupil…you are my tracks…my bleeding, reddened nose…my shivering night sweats.

  He was shoved out into the parking lot and beaten some more, the men cheering gaily as they drank their beer and pelted him with blows he thought were quite undeserved, but then again, what did he know? It was all very strange, but everything was so far away that he just couldn’t be bothered to give a damn, not even when they tossed him into the bed of a pickup truck and struck him over the head with a

  scholarly turtles in professor settings, peering over the rims of their spectacles at their students, looking out over the blank faces of the fish while everyone around me is drunk, happily unaware of their unhappiness…I can see for miles past the water over to endless lands that begin nowhere and have no shore…there’s that heavy numbness…that slurred everything…that unspeakable, undeniable EVERYTHING…and we can’t run from or to it, it is only there…and we can see everything because we can see nothing…scratch that…we can see nothing because we can see everything.

  * * *

  Jesus’ head throbbed upon waking. His eyes opened to a darkness only slightly less than the one from which he’d awoken, and the air was damp and musty. His stomach hurt and his joints ached.

  He tried to remember where he’d last been, but the only image he could conjure up was Lucifer’s grinning face. When he attempted to cry out for help, he found his throat to be too dry and sore to muster up anything louder than a raspy whisper.

  “Hey, look, I think he’s waking up.”

  The voice sounded gruff and throaty, and a little put-on, as though a portion of its masculine depth was exaggerated.

  “Shit, I think you’re right,” came another voice of similar timbre but without as much showy machismo. “So what are we gonna do with him?”

  Something was yanked off Jesus’ head and he could suddenly see again; he was lying in the grass beneath a cloudy night sky, looking up at one of the burly men from the bar, who was glaring down at him and holding a burlap sack, which Jesus now realized was what had been upon his head.

  “I texted Father Benway about twenty minutes ago,” said the one with the sack. “He should be here any minute. He sounded excited.”

  Jesus tried to sit up, but his body hurt too much for him to move, and his hands and feet were bound with thick plastic zip-ties. “Where am I?” he asked groggily. “Who are you? What’s going on?” About fifteen feet away, the other two members of the foursome were digging a hole that was already up to their waists, leading Jesus to wonder how long he’d been out. He strained his eyes to look around, and ascertained that they were in a wide clearing surrounded by dense, dark forest.

  “This is where you’re gonna die,” said the overly gruff one, who sat chomping a cigar on a stump a few yards to the sack-bearers left.

  “What do you think, Ted…should we have some fun with him?” asked the other one. He grinned down at Jesus, his smile yellow and stained with tobacco juice.

  Ted, the cigar-smoker, said, “Easy there, Georgie…we need to wait for Benway. We shouldn’t do anything without him givin us the go-ahead, first. If he wants him for tomorrow’s mass, he probably won’t want us roughin him up any more than we already have.”

  “How’s he gonna know the difference?” said Georgie, twisting the sack in his hands and leering greedily at Jesus, who swallowed nervously. His head was still extremely fuzzy and he was having trouble keeping up with all of this, but he at least knew that he was in trouble.

  “Just hold your horses,” said Ted, picking up a bottle of Bud Light from the grass and taking a huge swig. “Like you said, he’ll be here any minute.” He looked over his shoulder at the hole-diggers and called, “How’s that hole comin along, boys?”

  One of them shouted back, “It would come along a lot faster if you two fucks would come over and help!”

  Ted chuckled and puffed on his cigar.

  Jesus heard footsteps approaching through the brush, snapping twigs and crunching leaves, and a flashlight beam cut into the dark like a huge white knife. A short old man emerged from the edge of the forest and came to stand beside Georgie. He wore all black, save for the white clerical band at his collar. Brushing nettles and leaves from his shirt, he glared down at Jesus and said, “So,” he said, “this is the heretic.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Georgie, giving Jesus a swift kick to the ribs. “Rich fellow we met at the Bad Seed said he happened across him in an alley, hollerin and rantin about how he’s ‘the son of God’ and whatnot. Apparently he followed him to the bar, and when the rich guy tried to ditch him out back, this loony fucktard shot up some dope and then came right back in. So we told the dude that we’d find a safe place for his crazy friend.”

  Huh? Jesus thought in his delirium. No. No. What? No, Lucifer cares about me, he’d never do that to me.

  “At first we thought we’d take him out here and kill him and bury him,” said Ted, coming over to stand by Georgie and the priest, “but then we decided to call you out here to take a look at him and see if you wanted to use him as the sacrifice at tomorrow’s mass. We know it’s short notice, though, so if you’ve already got someone lined up, we’ve got that hole there and we’ll be more than happy to take care of him for you.”

  The priest stroked his chin, scrutinizing Jesus. “I do indeed have a sacrifice prepared for tomorrow’s mass,” he said, “and under different circumstances I’d take this man off your hands and keep him for next week. But…this is a special kind of heretic. He…”

  “I am…the son of…God,” Jesus croaked. “I am your lord…and savior.”

  Georgie kicked him again, harder, and spat on his face.

  “As I was saying,” said Benway, “this wretched creature is so low that he doesn’t even deserve a Catholic sacrifice. Heretics and naysayers are one thing, but this…a man who claims to be Jesus Christ Himself…no, I wouldn’t desecrate the holy ground of our church with his foul presence. You may do to him as you please.”

  God…Daddy…please, Jesus prayed silently. I don’t know what’s going on, but if you truly love me, you will save me from this. Strike down these men. Save me, please, please, save me.

  The two gravediggers came over, wiping sweat from their faces with the cuffs of their sleeves. One of them clapped the priest on the back and said, “Good to see you, Father. How’s my boy been treatin ya?”

  “Very nicely, thank you,” answered the priest. “He gives the best blowjobs in Mudhoney County, and that’s no small feat; I’ve gotten a lot of blowjobs from a lot of boys.”

  “He fuckin better,” said the gravedigger, nodding appreciatively. “I made him practice on me for years before I made him become an altar boy and turned him over to you. His own mother ain’t got shit on those juicy young lips. But if you wasn’t satisfied with him, I’d beat him to kingdom fuckin come, I swear it to Jesus.” He looked down at Christ and said, “The real Jesus, anyhow.”

  “No need for beatings,” said Benway. “He’s doing just fine. Tight little asshole, he’s got, too.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I was worried it’d be stretched out from all the times I done caught his brother fuckin him in the shed.”
>
  “You’d be surprised just how resilient are the assholes of young boys.”

  “Speaking of assholes,” said Georgie, “how’s about we plug this here one’s up with the cocks of righteousness?”

  There were murmurings of enthusiastic agreement.

  They all took turns with him, all four of the big men from the bar, while the priest stood off to the side, smoking cigarettes and watching passively.

  Georgie kicked Jesus over on his stomach and cut his trousers off with a rusty box cutter, the dull-ish blade painfully grazing his skin as it tore through fabric and thread. Jesus was biting down hard on his lip but couldn’t keep from whimpering.

  When he entered Jesus, it at first felt pleasant, the hard warm obstruction stimulating nerve endings as it penetrated deep into his anal cavity, and Jesus moaned softly as he hearkened back to those precious moments with Lucifer in the strip club bathroom. His cock stiffened.

  But then it started to feel different.

  Then it started to hurt. His cock withered.

  “God, Father, save me!” Jesus cried when Ted took over once Georgie was done. “Lucifer, where art thou? Why have you forsaken me?”

  One of the other men said disgustedly, “Hear that shit, boys? Fucker’s got a hardon for Satan, too.”

  If only they knew, Jesus thought.

  “He is a heretic of the most poisonous breed,” came the old, strained voice of the priest. “He must be destroyed, and utterly.”

  The third man slashed as Jesus’ back with something sharp, maybe the other one’s box cutter, as he fucked him and laughed heartily. The fourth broke a beer bottle over his head when he was done, and then plunged the jagged remains into his side and dragged it upward, scraping his ribs. Blood fed the grass and pooled in the curled basins of dead leaves.

  They shoved him over on his back and kicked him and beat him with sticks. One of them kept stomping on his face with a heavy, steel-toed boot. He felt his jaw break a few times and he had to keep swallowing sharp pieces of dislodged teeth to prevent himself from choking on them. They sliced up his throat on the way down.

  His eyes were bleeding. One of them rolled loosely in its socket. His nose was busted so badly that it bent at such an angle so the tip rested against his cheek. The blows to his stomach and chest caused him to puke blood and he had to turn his head to the side to cough out thick mouthfuls of it. The boot came down on the side of his head and as part of his face caved in he wondered vaguely how he was still conscious.

  Somehow, though, much of the pain was far away…there, but distant. He attributed this to the heroin. Once they started kicking at his groin, however, the pain became very real. He felt his testicles burst, tried to scream but only spurted out a dark concoction of blood and bile and teeth.

  One of them procured a long knife that beamed sinister in the starlight, and he knelt down so he could saw savagely into Jesus’ abdomen. The others crowded around and started pulling out the pink ropes of his intestines. The priest was laughing haggardly.

  When they grew tired of playing with his innards, one of them seized him by his long hair and began dragging him towards the hole. His guts trailed after him like weary afterthoughts.

  Lying there in the hole, he couldn’t feel the gasoline being poured onto him, but he could smell it as the fumes pervaded his mostly-exposed sinuses. He looked up at the men above him with his remaining good eye, and for a moment saw not five men but six…the priest, the four from the bar, and the devil. The latter stood grinning wildly, there but not, almost shimmering with faint translucence. But then he was gone, and the priest said, “Baptism by fire, motherfucker,” and then he took a final drag from his smoldering cigarette before casting it casually into the hole.

  Jesus awakened sharply on a velvet couch inside a vast, plush hotel lobby. The pain was gone, and Lucifer was back, sitting in an armchair across from him with a cigarette between his fingers and a smile on his face.

  “Rise and shine, kiddo,” Lucifer said. And then, “I’ve been waiting a very, very long time for this.”

  Jesus rubbed at his eyes. “Waiting for what?” he asked, anger creeping through the tired grogginess in his voice. “What the fuck, man? Did you sell me out to those guys? Did you know they would do those things to me? Did you let them kill me? Am I dead?”

  “No one is ever really dead,” said the devil, “and especially not you. But to the rest of your questions, yes.”

  Jesus’ bottom lip trembled and his eyes filled with tears. “But…why? Why would you betray me like that?”

  With mocking sarcasm, Lucifer said, “Oh heavens, whoever would have thought that the devil was capable of deceit? Certainly the Prince of Lies would never actually lie, right?”

  Leaning forward and massaging his temples, Jesus said, “So, wait…all those things you told me…about my dad, about the world, about you…none of that was true?”

  “Oh, no, that was all true. In fact, come to think of it, I never outright lied to you about anything. My only sin, here, if you will, was misleading you to think that I actually give even half of a fuck about you. I told you the truth about everything else, but it wasn’t because I had any real concern for you.”

  “Then…why? Why enlighten me to all these terrible truths?”

  Smiling wider and hitting his cigarette, the devil answered, “Because I wanted to win the bet. And what better way to defeat God than to give you the very thing that He has hidden from you all your life? That being, of course, knowledge. The most dangerous thing in the universe. It has an incredible capacity to destroy and corrupt, and it succeeded just as grandly this time as it has all the others.”

  “I thought…you and I…we had something. We…we made love.”

  Lucifer blinked, was silent, and then burst into cruel laughter. “Made love?” he repeated in disbelief. “Are you out of your fucking head, Christ? Fuck, man, I sodomized you because it was a perfect fuck you to your old man. I’d really already won the bet, but by that point I was just kind of rubbing it in, so to speak. I mean, when God created you, the last thing He had planned was for you to end up on your knees sucking the devil’s dick and then getting rammed up the ass with it. I’m never going to let Him live that one down.”

  Jesus was weeping silently by now. “So,” he said, “you never felt anything for me? You never felt that…connection?”

  Raising his eyebrows, Lucifer said, “In the name of your father, kid, have you lost your goddamn mind? Listen to yourself. I’m the fuckin devil. Did you really think I’d gone all soft and mushy inside just because I plugged you in a strip club bathroom? Look, I’ll be square with you. Beelzebub and I had a side-bet going on. He wagered that, no matter what happened, I wouldn’t be able to get you to suck my dick. And you see, my poor man, I don’t like to lose.”

  Jesus flushed with shameful embarrassment. “A farce,” he said. “It was all a farce. All of it. Ever since the very beginning.”

  “Shit, son, ain’t that the truth. Don’t take it so hard. Oh, wait, I guess you kinda already did, huh?” He sniggered as Jesus wept harder. “Too soon? Poor taste? Did I hurt your feelings, O Holy One?”

  Jesus wiped his eyes and said, “When did you turn so mean?”

  The devil shrugged. “When did you turn into such a bitch? The answer to both questions is the same, so figure it out. Now, aren’t you curious as to why you’re here, and not up in Heaven playing patty-cake with cherubs?”

  Jesus nodded, even though the cherubs preferred “Go Fish” to patty-cake. He didn’t think that particular detail was worth mentioning.

  “Well,” said Lucifer, standing up, “come see for yourself.” He held out his hand to Jesus, and Jesus took it.

  The ballroom was occupied by an excitedly chattering welcoming party, most of them drinking pink champagne. There were knives and hatchets and blunt weapons on many of the tables. When Jesus and the devil entered, the group grew quiet.

  “You don’t know these folks,” Lucifer said to J
esus, “because you have ignored all of them. They know you, though. They know you very well, and they aren’t tremendously fond of you.”

  “Why?” Jesus asked, his voice innocent and confused. “I never did anything to anyone.”

  One of the men stepped forward and said, “More like, you never did anything for anyone. You let the world run riot with excess.” His eyes were tired and he was holding the hand of a small child. The boy’s pants were soaked. “Worthless leaders, careless managers…a hierarchy of ignorance that thrives on the copious abundance of things, while the lowly struggle and suffer.”

  A woman emerged, dressed in a white lab coat, and said, “And what about me? I was so miserable, all the time. No one could help me...not my fiance, not my lovers, not my brother, and certainly not you. I was always covered in grime and it wouldn’t stay off no matter how many showers I took.”

  Jesus again opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, another man stepped forward and said, “The buzzing in my head never stopped. Fucking buzzing. You could have made it go away, I think. My parents, they said you had the power to do anything, but you didn’t take away my buzzing. And then I came here. This place made it go away. Because of Lucifer and his kindness.”

  A man with a cheese grater in his hand said, “I had to destroy myself just to be free. You never gave me freedom. You could have, but you didn’t.”

  Another man, this one timid and skittish-looking and adorned in clothes covered in blood, said, “Yeah, and where the fuck were you when that little pissant kid took my wife from me? You could have struck him dead, but I had to take matters into my own hands. And even that didn’t help. You could have given me something, anything to make life worth living, but even killing the asshole wasn’t enough to stop my sickness. It seems to me like a lot of us are, or were, at least, pretty fucking sick in one way or another. And you…what did you do?”