Highway To Hell

by Alex Laybourne

  Thunder rumbled along like the wheels of a carriage and the pounding hooves of the steeds that pulled it across the plains. The wind’s whistling had turned into an eerie groaning; a cross between a creaking door and a more classical impression of a ghost. The thunder rumbled again, expressing its own obvious annoyance at the insolent attitude shown by Graham and his group.

  All of them could feel the tension growing in the room. It pressed against them all like the G-force in an accelerating aircraft. Outside, lightning flashed, lighting everything for a short moment. The buildings’ silhouettes were traced in a phosphorescent light, which remained once the lighting was gone and darkness returned to the world, creating a negative impression of the desolate world that awaited them… or so they feared it was.

  With a demonstration of incredible self-control, Raguel calmed. His face returned to the normal pale coloration, the light returned to the world, first moving from midnight to late dusk through to a dawn style lull before the sun re-emerged and the town took on its old Wild West look once again.

  The others felt the change and were without any shadow of a doubt impressed with the sheer power that the men … no, angels – it would take time to get used to the word – possessed. Graham somehow seemed either less than impressed or completely taken aback by the display, for he remained standing where he was, staring down the men, Raguel in particular. It was a look Marcus knew well, one he had seen many times, both in the ring and reflected in his own face by the mirror in his dressing room before and after his appearance. Although the latter was often less intense and more ponderous, considering not only his actions and reactions during the fight, but also his future, and the normal questions of doubt that arose inside him. Why he did it? He never had an answer.

  Raguel held Graham’s stare and matched it with one of his own, and the thing that struck both Marcus and Helen was how human it looked. Unlike the previous image that had captured them, this stare, while being without any doubt cold and harsh, was undeniably human. “You are a cynical man, Graham Williams. You are responsible for more death than anybody in this room and yet you question the existence of a God the most. So did you kill because you wanted to, because you enjoyed it? Many men in your position with no faith would have turned and fled or allowed others to engage,” Raguel said, his voice now calm, all traces of the rage which had just consumed him was gone.

  “It was a war; it was kill or be killed.” Graham’s comeback tasted stale in his mouth, words used all too often, words which had now been reduced to nothing more than meaningless syllables uttered on an exiled breath. “The war is why I question. Men killing each other, turning on each other, rape, murder of innocent bystanders, people just trying to live their lives. Good people for the most. Believers. Where was your God then?” Graham asked. He had no plans to get involved in a theological debate with a man who called himself an angel and so far seemed to have the goods to prove his story, but he felt the anger rush through him and was unable to hold it back.

  Raguel smiled, a sight even more unnervingly human than the cold stare, and behind him the three other angels chuckled amongst themselves, like schoolchildren hearing someone say a dirty word.

  “Well I could give you the answer to that, but, to be honest, it’s more fun to keep it a secret.” He laughed. Not an evil laugh, nor the frolicking playful laugh one might expect from an angel. It was the laugh of a private joke of a secret piece of knowledge that people would never guess, nor would science prove.

  Marcus looked from Graham to Raguel and then back and forth between the two several times. He could see the tension in Graham’s face and the look of near boredom in Raguel’s, and so he decided that it was time to intervene.

  “Gentlemen, forgive out skepticism over your true identities. It is just that when certain things are introduced to you in life, you have a certain degree of expectation that goes with it. Thunder and lightning, for example: you don’t expect anything else to follow that first thunderclap than the next wave of lightning. Were you to look outside and see snow falling, you would stare in disbelief despite the real possibility of it occurring on a regular basis.” Marcus was in full flow, using his best courtroom language, hoping that it would sound if not respectful and least sincere. “Let us do this. We will assume that you are indeed Angels of the Lord, sent here to pull us from Hell, but I ask you, at least allow us some time to judge you or at least time to adjust to the notion that you don’t all carry harps and live on the clouds like a child’s cartoon would have us believe.”

  Raguel looked from Graham to Marcus and back to Graham again. “He doesn’t believe, he doesn’t want to believe and, to be honest, I wonder why we had to save him in the first place. You keep him under control or I’ll cast him back into the fallen world for good. I’ll bury him in such a deep level surrounded by his own nightmares that he will be wishing for the churchyard and the sounds of the pretty young Dutch girl screaming.” Turning his attention back to Marcus, Raguel continued. “I will not pander to your petty will. Your concept of perception will need to change, and so it changes now. You will listen to me. We pulled you out, but I will throw you back without warning should you so much as think about questioning us again. We have a lot to discuss – or should I say I have a lot to say and you all to hear. So let us begin, shall we?” With that he clapped his hands, creating a wall of sound like cannon fire, and everything began to change.

  XIII

  The tables with food disappeared, faded away, eaten out of existence by time itself like childhood memories once old age takes its icy grip on the mind. It moved like a flood and erased the color from the world first of all, and then like a cloud of cartoon termites it ate its way through the fabric of it all. The contents of the tables disappeared first, the silver serving sets and crystal glasses becoming tarnished and dusty, before becoming paler and paler until they were translucent. Once the tableware had become nothing more than faint silver outlines, the last few graying strands of the hairline that was their feast, it became the turn of the table and chairs, each one disappearing at a uniform pace, a curtain call of the most actual possibility.

  “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?” Helen cried, her voice filled with fear, her eyes were wide with terror. She felt dizzy. She reached out, took hold of Marcus’s arms and held him tight.

  The angels – for that is now what they were – said nothing. Raguel raised his head back and stared rather fittingly into the heavens while his three bodyguards remained standing in their statuesque positions.

  The building was next to go. Unlike the rest, it crumbled around them rather than disappeared. It decayed and fell apart, large clumps of brick and concrete. Marcus found this strange as all the other buildings he had seen through in the street had been old fashioned wooden creations. The sort of buildings that one would have seen in the old frontier towns back when Wyatt Earp justice was the reality and the saloon fell silent when a stranger came to town.

  It’s all a mirage; just showmanship, Marcus thought to himself. His years of police training and a level-headedness which had been beaten into his skull as a result of all the gym work and sparring had taught him to always look around not just at the center of the problem. He had learnt that more often than not there was a lot to be learnt by the problems created as a result of, rather than by, the initial problem itself. At least he had found it to be true when it came to investigating alibis and group encounters such as this.

  “Relax; they won’t hurt us; not after everything they did to get us here. They just want to show us how powerful they are. So we know they mean business,” Marcus whispered to Helen. Although he felt her grip on him loosen, he didn’t look, for it was now his turn to hold the stare of the angels – only it was not Raguel he was in contact with but the other three. Their eyes were as heavy as lead on his soul. He could feel them looking through him, inside of him in the place where angels – or so he assumed – waged their combat with all mortals.

  Helen said n
othing, and felt no better. It might well only be a hallucination or whatever, but it scared the hell out of her. In all honesty she was still in denial over everything, and in the back of her mind was the constant thought that she would wake up in bed next to her husband. He would be snoring away, lying with his back to her as he always seemed to be if she woke up in the night despite them having fallen asleep curled up together in some form or another. She expected to be covered in sweat, shivering and scared to open her eyes or look around for fear of seeing him... Luther… standing there his face, grinning as he drank hot blood from a large glass like the vampire he was. Oh but she would look, she would look with pleasure if she were to wake now and hear those deep inhalations of her other half, the man she loved with all her heart and soul. She would look not because he gave her strength, or because love conquers all, but because she would be alive. She would know it was had been but a horrible dream. Oh how she would look, she would stare deep into Luther’s cold ruthless eyes and smile at him and then allow herself to disappear like the buildings around her, fading as the memories of dreams always do.

  Yet deep down, beneath it all, Helen knew the truth. She knew she was trapped, she knew what lay ahead from them all would be horrid. She thought about Marcus’s words once more and felt better.

  The building disappeared, rotted around them the same way the world had done for H. G. Wells and his ‘character’ of The Time Traveler, only this journey did not yield any new civilizations or monstrous beasts, but rather seemed to leave the group standing surrounded by a pile of rubble. They stood stranded in the center of what looked like a smoldering bomb site in some war ravaged country. Small fires licked at the air in random places, smoke rose from towering piles of rubble and the choking air filled their throats with every breath, making them want to gag more and more each time. The ground beneath them was dirt; the stunning marble flooring was gone, vanished into the folds of time. In the distance they could hear screaming – or maybe it was just the wind as it whistled through the debris. A large crater had opened up in the ground before them. It separated the group from the angels, and it continued to open in a yawn. The earth fell away as if a vacuum pump had been turned on far down beneath the surface. The air was thick with dust and it was hot, the temperature well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and dry. It was as if some hygroscopic element had been released and had absorbed all of the moisture from the air. It was hard to breathe. Panic soon began to creep in, despite the fact that they were all dead, and had no real need to take in air. The women were the first to show signs of it, but soon, much like a wildfire, it spread. Sammy felt his head beginning to spin; even in the darkness he had a concept of what was stable and what was not, just as he knew if his eyes were open or closed.

  Graham and Marcus stood firm the longest, but soon even they began to feel the effects of the thin air. They began to pant. Sweat greased on their faces and made them sparkled in the firelight. Marcus tried to take a step forward, but his legs felt as if they had been weighted into the earth. Behind him, Graham, at least thirty-five years his senior, stood with his hands on his knees, head down low, looking at the ground like a sprinter at the end of a hard race. Graham fought hard to keep his balance, but in the end he fell.

  When Raguel finally returned his skyward gaze and directed it on the group, only Marcus had remained standing, although how much of it was simple, old fashioned stubbornness he couldn’t have said. It felt as though he had been caught right on the chin, yet even now, after all those years, all he wanted to do was hang on, to stay on his feet until he heard the bell.

  “You are strong. Even for a lesser being, you are strong, but still it doesn’t impress me. Nothing you people do, but I have been told that you are needed, and so we must come down to your level even if only to bring you back up to ours,” Raguel said in a patronizing tone. The entire time he spoke his eyes glowed, pulsing in time with the rise and fall of this pitch. “Look at me. All of you,” he bellowed. They all looked; even Sammy snapped his head around to look in the right direction. There was a flash of light, followed by the roar of the earth splitting open, bringing with it a scream that made their blood run cold and goose bumps erupt all over their flesh, from the tips of their fingers to deep down into their toes. Even their genitals were treated to a tight layer of chicken like flesh. The atmosphere crushed them and forced the remaining out of their lungs, and even Marcus was forced to take a knee.

  Raguel calmed and once again darkness fell, only this time none of them felt scared. They felt their lungs fill with air, their heads cleared. Their racing heartbeats, which had felt like the thundering of stampeding hooves in their chests and ears, began to slow as if the drover had finally taken control and brought the herd back under his command just before they decided to charge over the cliff edge and plummet to their deaths. They remained still, although Graham did manage to rise to his feet. His joints roared with fire, and his hips cracked, but he straightened himself and stood tall.

  What occurred next left little doubt in any of their minds as to the genuine nature of the claims the angels had made. A bright light appeared, one more brilliant than anything any of them had ever seen before. Suspended in the centre of it stood Raguel, and behind him the source of the light spread out for several meters both to his left and to his right. Sprouting from his back in large sweeping shapes were two wings. Their feathers were pure energy, each one detailed in ways the human eye cannot fully perceive. To the group they appeared as a brilliant white, yet in truth they held every color. None of them were visible, at least not on the plain of mortal vision, but they all knew that they were there.

  The ground shook beneath them and while fire leapt into the air, jumping from the ground like reverse lightning, none of them noticed. They were locked, held hypnotized by the wings, and the rustling sound of the feathers, which began to speed up quick and quicker, moving from a gentle rustle through to that of a bird ready to take flight and leave the nest in panic. The pitch increased until it reached such a frenzy that it hurt their ears. The light emitted by Raguel’s wings enveloped them, ridding their lives of shadow and fear, of everything. There was a flash and it was gone: they were back in the decrepit scene that they had just left. Only now they could breathe easy, and for the first time really take in their surroundings.

  “Where are we?” Becky asked first, her head and eyes in constant motion, surveying everything, watching, waiting for something.

  “What was that?” Sammy called. He had somehow been turned around and had walked away from the group. Not a great distance, but enough for him to realize without help that he had moved in the wrong direction. “What did I miss, someone?” he called, holding his hands out before him, and just for that second he looked exactly like the one thing he had promised himself he would not become: helpless.

  Becky, despite being the poser of the question, didn’t wait to hear the answer, but instead went towards Sammy.

  “It’s me. Don’t worry, I think we’re about to find out what’s going on, but believe me, you don’t want to see it,” Becky whispered to him. She took his hand, locking her fingers through his own. She gave them a slight squeeze, an invisible sign sent from her to him, just a way of giving him some reassurance while getting some for herself in return. She smiled when he squeezed back.

  Raguel seemed to wait for Becky to return to the group with Sammy before he answered. He did not do this out of his own good nature, nor because he wanted them all to hear what he had to say, but simply because it was a good game to him. Watching how these creations of God moved around so clueless about the world they lived in, their minds so one-dimensional – if that – and unable to accept what they were about to be told without the intervention of himself and his brothers.

  “What did you do to us?” Marcus asked. He had felt the silence growing heavy and been pushed to speak. Raguel shot him an angry glance, a ‘how dare you interrupt when I was about to speak’ look.

  “Something you do not
deserve. I have enlightened you, helped you all to ascend to a higher level, as you would say it. In short, I let you live,” Raguel said, but the words themselves were empty, nothing more than verbal shells. It was the manner and tone with which he uttered them that conveyed all they needed to know. He was bored, and had no desire to chat with them more than was necessary.

  They all noticed this and braced themselves for what was to come. They understood that it would only be spoken once and even then only if they were lucky.

  Raguel began.

  XIV

  “Think of this as Purgatory – I will try to keep to your simple way of categorizing things. There are many places just like this, realms or realities that exist alongside your own, within your own, and a near infinite number which exist in the different pathways of time. This you will see for yourselves, I am sure. These worlds exist to house those who had died. To allow them time for contemplation, and to give us time to judge them. Some worlds are filled with those who led a righteous life, one worthy of a happy eternity. Others are fire realms, nothing more than holding pens for the cattle that will be marched below to where out fallen brother leads his hedonistic life. Then there are many filled with lost souls; empty, lonely places void of all feeling; ghost worlds filled with those that were forgotten, left behind when it was their time to rise... or fall. These worlds all exist separate from each other. Those who dwell or wait in one know nothing about the others. Although memory of your own world remains, given time it fades. Those in the fire realms seem to remember the longest. They are the ones who grasp onto their human memories, as if it could somehow help them find redemption. While those who are righteous are given a mere taste of what awaits them and realize that there was no point to their lives. They are a short test which will determine your place in eternity. Pass and you will be rewarded, fail and punishment is a certainty, do neither and you will be destined to carry on living your mediocre existence in a world fitting to the task; a place such as this, for instance. This community, if you would like to call it that, is long abandoned. The souls simply fell from existence. In these outer worlds the boundaries that keep them sustained are weakened, bending all the time. It is not unheard of for these dimensions to disappear along with everybody in them. This was where we needed to bring you, for it is here that the boundaries are weakest. There is a war coming, a fight that has been brewing beneath the surface of all worlds since before time, and it is here that the first tears will appear. Once they start they cannot be stopped, and given time the barriers will break and all worlds will collide. Your earth, your mortal life, the kingdom of God will come crashing down from the heavens while the fiery underbelly of Hell will rise up and Lucifer, our fallen brother, will try once more to take control. This will not happen; it must not. Do you understand me?” Raguel’s eyes seemed to focus on all of them individually, yet simultaneously. It held them captive and allowed them all to see that this angel was far from the stereotype.