Windows Into Hell

by James Wymore

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  Cover Art by Eugene Teplitsky

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  ISBN 978-1-62007-134-2 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-62007-160-1 (paperback)

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  It started with a book recommendation by Dan Wells. I’d heard of the Library of Babel in a philosophy book, so the idea of a story set in it intrigued me. I read A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck.

  To be honest, I didn’t know what I thought of it at first. It starts with a character that shares my religion going to hell and finding out his cherished beliefs are wrong. Wasn’t this author a BYU professor? Then I went through hell with the character. I didn’t know if I understood the point at first, but I thought about it… a lot. I love books that make me think.

  I met the author. Then I went to a reading where he described his story as a religious horror. Religious horror! The words stuck in my head. Naturally, I recommended it to friends so we could talk about it. This story affected me. It came up time and again.

  In one such discussion with R. A. Baxter, we talked about how the story only told one of many possible hells. We both wanted to write these other Hell stories. An anthology idea was born.

  When I next saw Steven L. Peck, at a writers’ conference, Michaelbrent Collings was in the green room with us. I mentioned this idea for an anthology. They both lit up and wanted to write for it, as did many authors interested in exploring these ideas.

  Every story in this collection inspired me and made me think. The biggest surprise came from common themes, which I never expected. Welcome to the conversation about what can be seen through the Windows into Hell .

  - James Wymore

  imothy Gifford watched.

  People were always walking or driving somewhere in a hurry. Sometimes they tossed a few coins in his hat. Mostly, they just glanced at him and then looked away. He didn’t much like people. He remembered liking them before the war. Wasn’t much of a war, anyway, but it did him in.

  All these people, they didn’t get it. Deep down, they knew their lives were fragile. One little tip of the balance and everything would come crashing down. For him it was the sarin gas. “Gulf War Syndrome” they called it. Smoking his whole life had been a bad choice, but since the war, he couldn’t take a single deep breath anyway.

  None of that mattered. He could take drugs and use inhalers. He’d lost the ability to pretend everything was going to be okay. Watching missiles fall out of the sky, only to get shot from the ground and then rain burning rocket fuel all over a city… that took something out of him. Smelling black smoke rise from burning oil wells, seeing a whole army surrender for lack of water after two weeks, it all changed the way he saw the world. He couldn’t unsee people blowing themselves up with dynamite to try to get into heaven.

  So he watched these people instead.

  They could glance at him and one second later forget they saw a hobo sitting on the concrete propped against the corner of a building. They could believe the little numbers in their computers were money, and that going to a job every day and home to a television added up to a life worth living. He couldn’t. He couldn’t forget, and he couldn’t look away.

  He watched as the sun went down behind the banks and offices along Main Street. The crowd changed from business people and delivery truck drivers to shoppers and lovers. The temperature dropped. It wasn’t quite Christmas shopping season, but a few early birds were already carrying gifts out onto the street between shops and the mall.

  Night clubbers replaced the dinner-and-a-movie types after the dark set in. Weird clothes and funny hair strutted around, talking too loud. As the night grew later, people noticed Timothy less and less. He coughed harder and harder, then it suddenly stopped and he wasn’t cold anymore.

  Three of them sat in a row on a chair in an office, and Timothy was in the middle. The other two moved away, leaving empty seats between them all. Timothy sighed. He hated this nightmare. He’d signed up with the military to avoid this exact thing. No hell could be worse than an office job.

  When he breathed in, it didn’t hurt. That’s different . He took a deep breath, filling his lungs almost to bursting, and held it to the count of twenty. Then he slowly let it out, feeling the bliss of clean, elastic lungs exhaling. Oxygen, wonderful oxygen entered his blood and his brain. The other two people, both women, kept looking away from his stained trenchcoat, fingerless gloves, and long scarf. He’d made the scarf himself from t-shirts he ripped apart and tied together. One woman pretended to look at a potted plant. The other one stared straight ahead because on the far side of her were windows with a perfect view of Hell’s classic fire and brimstone.

  A door opened on the far side of a big desk and a giant red demon came through.

  Timothy realized his hat was missing, so he reached up to smooth his hair. He always figured he’d end up in hell sooner or later. Heaven was for people who could look away from the bad things and pretend they weren’t there.

  “Hello. Welcome to the afterlife. We’re in a bit of a hurry. Big earthquake happening in a few hours, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t take the time to chat.”

  The women leaned forward and looked at each other, then back at the demon. They whispered and mumbled.

  “It’s Xandern, by the way, in case you need my name for your customer satisfaction survey.” He opened his eyes wide, waiting for a laugh. Then he picked up a tablet from the desk and began tapping it with one black claw.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  The woman on Timothy’s left faded. Her gasp cut short as she disappeared.

  “Any last requests?” the demon said, scratching between his black horns and looking at the other woman.

  She looked scared enough to cry or pee her pants. Timothy wanted to reach out a hand and comfort her, but he’d learned through long experience that people didn’t want him touching them.

  “Somewhere cool? I don’t much care for the heat,” she said.

  The demon bellowed a hearty chuckle. Tap-tap-tap. “Frozen tundra it is!” Tap. She disappeared.

  When the demon looked at Timothy, the man didn’t look away.

  “You aren’t afraid?”

  “I guess not.”

  “If you don’t mind indulging me, I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.” Timothy wondered how long before this guy remembered he was in a hurry. No different than anybody. They were always in a hurry.

  “Why?” The demon’s yellow eyes squinted.

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you walk away from any kind of normal life and spend your last years as a bum?”

  “I like watching people.” It wasn’t strictly true. Timothy didn’t really like people or watching them. He just couldn’t look away.

  “You don’t seem upset to be dead.” The demon sat down and tipped his head to one side. “Do you not understand what’s going on here?”

  �
��Of course I do.” Timothy shrugged, pulling at a loose thread on his left glove. “I just don’t care.”

  “How can you not care?”

  “Way I see it, my life ended a long time ago. Before the war, I…”

  “Enough.” The demon held up a clawed hand. “I don’t have time for this.”

  Timothy nodded. Nobody ever did.

  “So you’ve been living in a kind of self-made hell already.” Xandern bobbed his head up and down.

  Timothy didn’t answer.

  The demon tapped the tablet a lot more than he had for the other two. “I don’t think I could do anything worse than what you’ve done to yourself.”

  “I didn’t choose it,” Timothy said, “I just couldn’t…”

  Tap.

  he last thing I remembered was staring down the wrong end of a gun.

  It had never happened to me before—obviously—and even though I remembered the other guy pulling the trigger, remembered the white-hot sound of the bullet poking a hole in me, the final flash of red pain… even though I remembered all of that, it was still hard to understand what was going on.

  Killed in the line of duty.

  I heard the voice in my head—my dad’s voice, always the old man—say the words. He’d always said that was the best way to go: killed in the line of duty.

  But he hadn’t died that way. He died of a tumor that went from “impossible to see on the X-ray” to “the size of a golf ball, please put your affairs in order” in the space of six months. He would have loved to die in the line of duty . But not me. I didn’t really want to die at all, and if I had to die, I’d have preferred to be suffocated by the weight of the ten or twelve naked supermodels fighting over who got the first piece of me.

  …Not looking at a fat, greasy blob of a man who pulled a gun out of his jacket so fast I thought I was seeing a magic show (Nothing up my sleeve! ) and then pulled the trigger. And then… he killed me.

  Me.

  Not that Dad would have admitted that the way I died was in the line of duty. He’d have bitched and made snide comments about my profession, about my job performance, about anything and everything I did. Dad always did that. He was “a good cop,” which to him meant being able to find my flaws and write the appropriate ticket for each one of his only son’s personal, professional, and social problems.

  Dad never liked me much. The feeling was mutual. When he died, I didn’t cry. I managed to restrain myself from singing a rousing chorus of, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” at his funeral service (which I paid for, by the way). But that was about all he got from me.

  Dad didn’t die in the line of duty. I did, as far as I was concerned.

  But that didn’t matter, because nothing I did was ever good enough for him.

  Dad probably would have stood there and bitched at me as I got killed. And the worst part of that was that he would have been right. I should have seen that piece under the guy’s coat. But I didn’t, and I got shot. And then…

  I looked around. For a second I didn’t understand where I was or what had happened. Then the memories came, and I knew. Knew I was dead. Had been killed , dammit all to hell.

  Even though I understood what had happened, I still had no real idea where I was. I mean, it was an office of some kind, that was sure. But I’d never seen an office where every time a drawer opened, it sounded like someone was being tortured inside. Or a computer that kept shrieking with the sound of a thousand people being brutally murdered right before saying, “You have a new d-mail!” in a deep voice that sounded like that guy who does all the movie trailers that start, “In a world where nothing is safe,” and then shows things blowing up.

  I didn’t understand what was going on. The screaming was getting to me. The bone-furniture was creeping me out.

  And the guy? The dude sitting behind a desk that seemed to be resting on the posed skeletons of maybe a dozen toddlers and infants? Him I got least of all.

  He was so ordinary. Just a guy. Skinny-ish, with brown hair that was pulling back a bit at the temples. Eyes of no discernible color, could have been brown or hazel or gray. His thick, horn-rimmed glasses kept settling on the tip of his nose no matter how often he shoved them back with his forefinger. A white button-up shirt—short sleeves and with an honest-to-goodness pocket protector that held maybe six hundred different pens. When God first invented the “nerd,” this was the prototype he used.

  The guy—the Nerd—looked at me. He was sweating. A lot. Flop-sweat like you only see on people who are about to die or on uber-dorks who are about to begin social interaction. I didn’t think this guy was going to die—I assumed he’d already done so, like I had—so I got the sinking suspicion he was going to talk to me.

  “Well, uh…” His attempt at a scintillating start fizzled out. He knuckled his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose for the umpteenth time and gave it another shot. “So, mister…” He flipped a few pages back and forth on the desk while the computer shrieked about more “d-mail.”

  For a geek, this guy seemed very popular. Or he just got a lot of spam, which made a perverse sense—there’s no way spammers would let the trifling fact of one’s death get between you and their mortgage-lowering, penis-enlarging, hook-up-offering messages.

  The Nerd sighed, like he was trying to figure out how to scratch his nuts in public or some other awful task. Maybe he was remembering his last botched attempt at a date. Maybe that was how he had died: trying for someone beyond his pay grade and being terminally kicked in the balls for his attempt.

  “Mr. Vincent,” he began. “I’m going to level with you—”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What?” He blinked, almost like he wasn’t sure how he’d lost control of the conversation so quickly.

  “You know my name, Poindexter. What’s yours?”

  He gulped. “It’s—well… I… Look, you’re dead and we need to focus on that.”

  I stood up. Went to the door at the back of the room. When I opened up my eyes after being killed, I was just… here . I had no idea what was on the other side of the office’s only door, but I figured I was about to get bad news from this dork, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  Why did I think I had bad news waiting? Well, one, I was dead, and two, the way I lived wouldn’t exactly qualify me for sainthood.

  I was in Hell. I knew it. I was sure of it. And I was sure as hell going to get out of it.

  I had my hand on the doorknob in a flash, but when I twisted it, the thing wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t even rattle under my hands.

  “Mr. Vincent, please,” began the Nerd.

  I turned. Launched myself at him.

  The move took him by surprise, which was what I intended. I grabbed him by the throat, and my other hand grabbed a letter opener from his desk. The letter opener had a bone blade and a haft that looked like a finger. I didn’t care what it was, or how it had come to be. It was pointy, and that’s all I needed.

  The Nerd started sweating even more, which confirmed my suspicion that I could get out of this. People always fear a strong man willing to kill. Even in Hell. Maybe especially in Hell.

  “All right, Eugene,” I said. “I’m going to shove this thing right through your carotid unless you tell me right now how to get out of here.”

  The Nerd’s mouth opened and shut a few times. I realized I was holding him so tight he couldn’t breathe, so I loosened my grip on his throat just a bit.

  He sucked in a huge breath of air. “I can’t tell you,” he choked out.

  I started pressing down with the macabre letter opener. Blood welled. “Wrong answer.”

  “Wait!” he gasped. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

  “Fine, then I kill you, get the key, and go for walkies.” Blood poured out, staining his shirt collar red.

  “No key.” His eyes began to roll back.

  “Then how do you get in and out?”

  He started wheezing, a weird sound that chilled me.r />
  Laughing. The guy was laughing .

  And as soon as I realized that, I felt the hand around my throat.

  I’m a big guy. Six-two, two-hundred-thirty pounds. All muscle. So when I tell you the hand on my throat was Strong , with-a-capital “S,” I hope you understand what I mean. The hand literally lifted me off the floor then tossed me back like a stick. I slammed into a window on the opposite wall, and the horizontal blinds covering the glass crashed down from their moorings and I saw what was beyond.

  A river of lava. A huge, smoking, sulfurous river that burbled and boiled and looked so real that just seeing it made me feel like a marshmallow about to be s’mored. On the banks of the river were groups of men and women, lounging around on the ground and on the rocks and standing around. They were talking, laughing; a few of them leaning over from time to time to light cigarettes in the blistering heat of the lava.

  Intermingled with them: demons. Tall and red, with muscled chests and cloven hooves. They had pitchforks, and I saw that some of them were in fact using them to roast marshmallows, a puffy white cylinder on the tip of each tine, bursting to flame the instant the pitchforks were extended over the lava, then reeled back to where the demon could blow on them and then hand out masses of scorched, sweet goo to other demons and to the “normal” people.

  One of the normals saw me. He nearly swallowed his cigarette. Then pointed my way and said something to the demon nearest him—one with a bluish coat of hair riding up his naked back and tattoos that all involved impossibly violent sexual tableaus.

  The demon jabbed another demon, got his attention. Pointed my way. By now everyone seemed to be looking at me. Blue demon finished pow-wowing with his buddy.

  The buddy yelled, “We’re on, people!”

  All the normals jumped as one into the lava. They started burning. Screaming. Clawing their way to the banks of the magma flow where they were shoved or prodded back into their torment by the waiting demons.

  A voice at my back shouted out, “Clarence, don’t bother. Let them finish up for the day!”