Letters From Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  On Day 47, I think it was, I was walking home from work when I saw two Demons burst out of a tenement dragging a man by the arms. Both Demons were female; one with a short banged Louise Brooks cut which I thought was both weirdly becoming and sort of absurd, and the other with her hair pulled back in a single thick braid. Both glanced at me, but the one with the braid held my gaze longer.

  I recognized her as Chara. And I knew she recognized me.

  But they dragged the weeping, babbling man away, and I approached a cluster of timid neighbors who were watching the incident. "What did he do?" I asked them.

  "Nothing, probably," someone replied. "Sometimes they just pick people at random for the torture plants."

  "Why?"

  This person looked at me in awe. "Because it’s Hell, that’s why!"

  A wailing made me turn my attention back to the man’s house, and I saw a woman clinging to the doorframe, sobbing violently.

  "That’s his wife," another person said to me.

  "Did they die together?"

  "No…they met here in Hell."

  This has set me wondering again why I haven’t met anyone I know here…not just family, like my father who died several years ago, but grandparents, uncles and aunts, my wife’s deceased grandparents, and so on. When my wife ultimately dies, and assuming she doesn’t go to Heaven (which I doubt, because she was an agnostic like me, though maybe her new boyfriend is a church-goer who can save her soul), will I ever run into her? Hell is vast. I think it might even be infinite. And even if I did meet her eventually, she might be an elderly woman who died of a stroke. An Alzheimer’s victim who would not even remember me.

  I miss her. I hate her. I realize I still love her.

  I have shelter. I have food.

  But I’m lonely.

  I pity that woman who watched her husband dragged away to endure horrors, and I hope he is returned to her soon, though I’ve heard rumors that one might spend anywhere from days to years in a torture plant.

  Chara helped take him away. She is evil. She has no soul. She is the enemy. I mustn’t forget that, however beautiful she is. Why I was hoping to see her again I have no idea.

  The rain is stopping now…

  Day 55.

  I’m so tired from work, I have no energy to write in this. It’s not that it’s strenuous work, just so numbing. I’m little more than a robot…

  On my conveyor belt there is one green mark. Just one, I think, though there may be several I’m seeing, very distantly spaced out. Does some other worker stand there all day, punching his lever just on this apparently single mark? I see the green mark once every hour, I’d say. And I’m tempted to throw my lever when it comes level with the red indicator etched on my track, just to see what would happen. If someone told me that in doing so, I would cause all of Hell to go up in a nuclear blast, vaporized out of any level of existence, I would do it. I would throw that switch. I would pull that trigger.

  Day 57.

  Because I am bored, and in a sardonic frame of mind, I have decided every day here is October thirty-first, so I have purchased white gourds from the market, hollowed them out, carved evil faces in them, and put scented candles inside. I have one on my bedside table and one in my window, facing out. I’ve viewed it from the street with satisfaction. I like to lie back on my bed with my Jack-O’-Lanterns as the only light, watery mellow orange membranes of light quivering across my ceiling and walls.

  The girl who works here cleans my room, and she’s asked me once again if I wanted her to come to see me at night. Again I told her no, but it was harder this time. Hell will do that to you. Hell will pare down your sense of outrage, which doesn’t grow back like your flesh does.

  If I could kill myself again, I would.

  Day 60.

  I saw Angels up close for the first time today. My shift had let out and I was entering onto my street when there came a low, resonant rumbling sound from the distance. It was too mechanical to be thunder, and I was accustomed to the various sounds of the skyscraper machine in whose shadow my hotel/boarding house squatted—it wasn’t that, either. Though some of the skyscraper’s sounds could be quite disconcerting, often waking me from my sleep, this was unsettling for its steadily mounting sense of approach. And…its familiarity.

  It had been a while since I’d heard the sound of motorcycles. Numerous motorcycles.

  The realization put me instantly in mind of my hometown of Eastborough, Massachusetts. Some years back, a child riding on the back of her father’s motorcycle had been killed when a drunk driver forced the bike off the road. Every year on the anniversary of her death, local bikers had gathered in a grim, noisy parade through the center of town and on into Pine Grove Cemetery, where the child had been buried. Yes…this sound was exactly like that.

  When the first motorcyclist came growling loudly onto my street, I was too struck by the rider’s appearance to take much note of his bike, whether it was of an Earthly model or something more unique, exotic, celestial in some tangible way. Never having been the type to salivate over cars, trucks and other phallic extensions, I suppose the bikes looked just like big black chrome-trimmed insects to me.

  But if the bikes were uniformly black, the opposite was true of those mounted upon them. I knew what they were as soon as I viewed the foremost of them.

  Some of them wore monk-like robes, with hoods or cowls either up over their heads or fallen off to hang down their backs. Others, like the first rider, wore tall cone-like hoods, either with the face entirely open or else covered so that only the eyes showed through holes in the fabric. Some of these robes shimmered like satin, while others were of plain cloth…but all of the riders were dressed entirely in white.

  When the last of them had rumbled past, bouncing over the roughly cobbled street, I realized I had unconsciously backed up across the sidewalk until my shoulder blades touched the brick face of one of the street’s dismal, dusty structures. A few of the Angels had turned their heads to hoot at me, but luckily none of them had pulled over to accost me. Perhaps they had some specific destination in mind. Anyway, it seemed that they had already had a bit of fun: I noticed blood stains vivid against the white cloth of more than one of them. Several wore swords like the Demon warriors of Oblivion did, but all of them had holstered pistols hanging from their black leather belts. Most had shotguns or what looked like various submachine guns slung over their backs, or rifles sheathed in long bags of stiff black leather like a cowboy might have by his saddle.

  I could swear one of them had a crossbow.

  The rumbling receded, thankfully, but I was still unnerved just knowing they were still within the city’s borders, however expansive. I pitied whoever might encounter them more intimately than I had. At first I thought that they might be headed toward the Aviary.

  The Aviary was a long street I had discovered recently while exploring the city during my free hours. The brick buildings ranked along its length were much like the shops in other blocks, but instead of glass windows they had cage fronts of chicken mesh or net-like rope mesh or iron bars, as crude as those of a prison cell or filigreed and flowery like the railings of romantic terraces. The wares displayed within these diverse birdcages were prostitutes even more variegated. White, black, Asian. Naked or clothed. Anorexic or obese. Gray haired or adolescent. Female or, in lesser numbers, male.

  The majority of this menagerie’s inhabitants struck me as being willing prisoners, winking or cooing or calling to passersby like myself, baring their breasts or spreading their legs, bending over to present their bottoms. But there were those who looked sullen, in despair, even in terror, whom I took to be the victims of other Damned souls exploiting them as my landlord apparently exploited his young helper. At the very least, they were victims of their own desperate need. Despite the guilty visual pleasures, it was ultimately as debased a display as would have been a street lined with bodies writhing on stakes. I haven’t been back since.

  No, I decided…the Angels h
adn’t gone there. Where would be the fun? Better to ravage those who chose not to sell their bodies. To chase women down in the street, or boldly drag them out of their houses to rape in front of their husbands.

  I have learned that a good number of people marry in Hell, the ceremonies carried out in secret by former justices of the peace or the occasional minister who suffered a rude awakening upon rebirth. And while procreation in Hell is impossible, there are children here in abundance, and it isn’t at all uncommon for married couples to adopt them as their own. It is this kind of behavior that reassures me even as a place like the Aviary disillusions me. And it is just these sort of people, I presumed, that the Angels would feel most drawn to in the course of their sport.

  But all I could be certain of, at this point, was that I was glad the parade hadn’t stopped to have sport with me.

  Day 62.

  I’ve read that dreams can seem to cover a lengthy period of time, when in reality they last only something like minutes. Or is it seconds? Time distorted, compacted, compressed.

  Last night, in a dream, my afterlife flashed before my eyes.

  At first, I was a boy—alive—and I was in my grandmother’s garden. I was reliving the time I saw a praying mantis crawling on her lilac bush. I had forgotten about that time, until this dream. The mantis was green, not purple.

  There was a rumbling growing in the distance, like a train coming. I ran around to the front of her house and stood on the bright green grass of her front lawn, shielding my eyes from the summer sun as a parade of motorcycles filed past, on their yearly pilgrimage to Pine Grove Cemetery…where my father is now buried. Where, I suppose, I must be buried.

  Even in my dream I wondered if I had subconsciously stolen these things—the mantis, the parade of bikers—as material from which to build my experiences in Hell. Even while dreaming, I wondered if this were perhaps merely a dream within a dream…

  When the last cyclist had passed, I tilted my head up to gaze into the sun. Its fiery radiance seemed to be spreading across the sky. The entire sky was becoming molten. The light became less whitely concentrated, more diffused and reddish. When I looked down again at the street, I saw that it had become cobblestoned. The pretty New England houses across South Street were now a solid wall of brick row houses. They looked so tangible, but I knew they were not. Every brick was made of the same ether as my body, compacted, compressed, just molded differently.

  I watched as one of the many bricks in one of the many buildings of Oblivion began to wriggle its way out of its slot, mortar trickling down like dust. Then the brick worked itself free, and flew toward my now adult body. I did not try to dodge it. The brick struck my flesh with only the faintest breeze of an impact, and disappeared inside my chest.

  Another brick dislodged itself. Another. From a second building, a third. They flew at me now from multiple directions, blurred streaks like arrows into St. Sebastian, and vanished into my body as I spread my arms like wings to accept them.

  A man walking along the street suddenly turned to stare at this phenomenon. Startled, he began to run away. But as if his legs were under my command, they sent him veering toward me. He rushed headlong at me, and when he collided with me, it was like the barest mist breaking against me. He was gone. I spread my arms wider. My arms were longer. I was taller. The city was feeding me…

  A woman came racing around the corner against her will, running into my open embrace. I consumed her. A window smashed, and an infant hurtled toward me. I accepted him into my bosom.

  The parade of Angels came tearing up the street. One by one they launched themselves into me and now I was taller than the roof of the hotel I live in.

  Multitudes now swarmed toward me, bodies tumbling over each other, crashing like waves against me. Demons. I looked for Chara but it was impossible to isolate a single face in the chaotic flood.

  If we had the power to regenerate our bodies, didn’t we have the power to shape our own cells? Thus, all of the citizens of Oblivion, all of the inhabitants of Hell, were willing our cells to blend together. So shouldn’t we have had one anonymous communal mind? But I recognized this consciousness as my own mind, my own personality, my own distinct being. The others were lost, extinguished within it as they fed into me. Was I more powerful than they? No, I realized. Suddenly, I had an enlightenment. I had an epiphany…

  This was why I had never met anyone I knew in Hell. Or anyone I knew of. No historical figures, no celebrities, no family. These millions, billions of people were not losing themselves in me. They were returning home.

  I was steadily assimilating, gathering into me every man, woman and child—every Demon, Angel and praying mantis—in Hell. Each consumed, processed, made a part of me; each a single cell in my body which grew more and more huge, like an ocean built raindrop by raindrop, the rain coming in torrents like the rains at the beginning of the Earth. I swelled, I expanded, a giant looming higher than the six towers of the beacon-like Overseers, higher than the skyscrapers. I thrust my head through the ceiling of glowing lava. Beyond it was so glaringly bright that at first I thought it was still the white-hot lava. But no. It was light. Then I thought I am in Heaven. No. Not yet. Maybe not at all…

  I continued to launch myself higher in my growth, as if I sucked matter in through the soles (souls) of my feet. But I realized now that my ectoplasmic body had lost its illusion of appearance, of physical substance. And as I lost substance, the void of light around me took on substance in a kind of trade off, as if it in turn was feeding off me.

  Red stars appeared in this negative of deep space. Then I saw one of them closer up. A shining red planet, smooth as a river pebble. Another, in the distance beyond that…also a bright but dark red. Another, so close now I could see more of them reflected in its glossy surface (though I could not see my astral face reflected there). More and more planets, more than there are in the universe.

  Soon they were all around me. But as I shot higher (and at last, I could no longer feel a solid surface below my feet—I had either flown upwards or it had dissolved beneath me), the planets appeared to recede a bit below me. They were so many, they took on the appearance of clusters, galaxies. Mixed in were some planets of other colors. Whitish. Grayish. These planets might have been asteroids, as they had less regular shape than the smooth red bodies. Heavenly bodies…

  The surrounding light was losing its blinding glare. I could see something now beyond the red constellations, a blur taking on darkness and color. A body taking on form, even as I had lost mine, translated into sheer force, pure essence. I knew Whose body it was. I was not afraid to say His name anymore. I had grown too powerful to fear retaliation, punishment. Solidifying behind the hanging stars was the figure of the Creator.

  I was in the presence of God.

  It was not so much that He was behind the red stars, but below them; I seemed to be lifting above His still obscure head. The crimson galaxies themselves obscured Him like a veil. Titanic as I had grown, He was vaster yet. And yet…was it mere self-deception that I sensed in myself the greater power? His waning, as mine gathered? He trapped in that mountainous form which came gradually into focus, as I was liberated into unadulterated spirit?

  The red planets were so distant under me that they looked more like mists than galaxies. Mists suspended in one incredibly drawn-out moment in time. Time standing still.

  Standing still like a photograph of a volcano erupting, spraying droplets of red fire in all directions. God’s head was frozen in time like that. And it had erupted like a volcano. God’s head had opened like a flower, pollen billowing up from it. His halo was a cloud of blood, an aurora borealis of blood suspended in the air and in time but I was not suspended, I was moving, still rising, rising above it all…I was going to leave it all behind me, below me, it would grow so small and distant that it would be lost to me. Then there wouldn’t even be this surrounding light. (A shotgun’s muzzle flash, also locked in time?) Even light was something. I would shed even that
like a cocoon. There would only be darkness and sweet nothingness: the only Heaven I could crave, believe in, or invent.

  At last…at long last…after all my suffering on Earth…after all my suffering in Hell, though now I knew it had lasted only a fraction of a microsecond in a mind gone kaleidoscopically insane with its obliteration…I was free. I was filled with peace.

  In nothingness I was reborn. I was the phoenix of oblivion.

  I was the fleeting thought and the fleeing soul of a suicidal God.

  …but when I awakened, I stared at cracks in the plaster ceiling that looked so real, so mundane. It was only illusion that this was all just an illusion. It was only a dream that this was all simply a dream. Or, rather, the ceiling was indeed an illusion. But it would protect me from the illusion of the lava rain. And the hunger gurgling in my belly was only an illusion, but I had to rise now and chew my illusionary bread, drink my hallucinatory tea.

  My head never did truly, literally regenerate after that shotgun blast. But I lifted it, nonetheless, from my pillow so I could breakfast and write these words.

  Day 64.

  I’ve had this bug or flu for several days; it started out as a cold but now I’m feverish, light-headed, with an intensely focused pain behind the bridge of my nose and one eye like a sinus headache. Since I arrived in Hell, I’ve seen people with rashes, sores…sneezing, sniffling…hacking up phlegm, vomiting in the street. Are our ailments imaginary, illusionary—in a sense, psychosomatic? Are we all hypochondriacs, deluded into our respective sicknesses? Or does the Creator manufacture demonic microorganisms as He does those flesh-eating crabs and air-swimming eels, to torment us from within? Last night I had a feverish dream, inspired by a drawing by a 15th Century artist in one of my parents’ books, which had terrified but fascinated me as a boy. It showed St. Anthony being set upon by colorfully bizarre demons who tugged at his garments and hair, clawed him, raised clubs to smite him. I imagined these demons inside my body, and tearing at my blood cells like that, biting into them, ripping them to shreds. Microscopic vampires.