Afterlife

Opening my eyes, I found myself in another world. My vision was dim, at first, all soft and hazy like a good dream. My eyes were then stung by a cold cyan light. I tried to blink, to force my eyelids shut, but it was no use. I could not close my eyes.

I was standing when I awoke, it would seem, for I felt myself drop to the ground with a heavy grunt at the moment I was pierced by the light. I was forced to cope with the situation at hand, propping myself up on my elbows and cautiously looking to the source of the sterile radiance. I felt as though I might go blind.

Everything came into focus all too quickly. A dark hooded figure stood painfully upright, holding a staff at an uncomfortable distance from my head. At the end of the staff there sat the light, ceaselessly illuming and obfuscating with its depthless luster. I managed to forestall every question that sprang into mind. I knew the place which I had come to.

This was not anything like my imaginings. I had always thought of the usual menagerie with demons leaping about, brandishing pitchforks to the staccato rhythm of a blazing infernal pit. Instead, I was surrounded in silence with only a single cloaked ghoul for company. And this was far beyond the horror of my fantasies, for this was inescapably real.

"Stand." commanded the figure. He-assuming the baritone that left me quivering belonged to a male-spoke without warning or question. He was obviously in control, and expected immediate obedience. I did not wait to see what punishment hesitation might incur.

Fumbling to get up, I noticed the extremely arid dust. The floor looked to be cyan, from the light, but I mused that it must really be beige or some other color common to the desert. I finally managed to secure a firm stance in the sandy ground when the ghoul issued another command.

"Come."

A few mere seconds of walking provided more than enough information regarding my surroundings. The ceilings were beyond the scope of the ghoul's light, yet the walls told me that I was in a kind of cavern. Dead, stagnant air surrounded me-I found a curious lack of sensation when I attempted to inhale it. The climate was neither cold nor warm, as if no temperature existed in this place.

The ghoul, whom I had assigned the role of guide, lead me down a series of narrow passages, pushing ever-deeper into the subterranean. I paid little attention to the sinking feeling that accompanied each step downward, trying only to comprehend the nature of this place I was now experiencing.

No air, warmth, or external light. This far surpassed my previous inklings of hell. This was far more insidious, lending to itself an element of void that begged to be forgotten. Yet it could not be forgotten, as it consumed every thought that crossed my mind. My surroundings engendered a growing anxiety inside my skull, a pressure that demanded release. I ever-more wished to move on and relegate this world to memory.

The ghoul's oily black cloak kept ahead of me, the unearthly torch shining well ahead. I almost lost myself in the near-darkness, tripping over the outcropping of some pernicious rock. The ghoul paused from his tireless pace and turned ever so slightly back towards me. I could feel a substance leaking out of my leg where the rock had struck it, but it had no temperature and I did not think it could be blood; it did not matter, in the face of the ghoul's wrath.

At last I the guide stopped. Too abruptly, though, for I almost stumbled into him. Swiftly darting aside, the ghoul precluded the possibility of what may have been a reassuring sensation for me. I was being denied the satisfaction of knowing whether or not I was still in the company of the corporeal.

"This," the ghoul began, "is your first decision."

I was now standing at the entrance to a tremendous cavern. The walls to either side had disappeared, as though this very place may be the center of some vacuous galaxy. The only source of light remained the ghoul's staff, yet it seemed impossible that this vast empty space could be home to only one light.

Not knowing how to reply to the open-ended statement of the guide, I skirted the brink of echolalia replying, "First decision?"

The guide seemed less terse in his explanation of what lay at hand: "This hall is home to those that choose the embrace of eternal nihil. They exist, or so it would appear, but they sense nothing. They are numb to thought, perception, feeling... To them, it is though they do not exist-even as they litter the floor."

It was only then, as he mentioned it, that I realized my weary feet were no longer perched on lifeless dust. A writhing, throbbing mass of fleshy substance churned beneath me, causing me to nearly fall once more-had it not been for the horror that gripped me at the thought of having to paw my way up from the tangled melee. I was not being drawn down, yet I felt myself sinking still further...

"I have a choice?" I said, now incredulous that some punishment fit to my crimes had not already been selected.

"Yes. You will be presented with two choices more, if you should desire to proceed from this place."

My curiosity was piqued. As comforting as the blissful ignorance of this place seemed, I could not bear to think of myself as another husk wallowing in the squirming mess. I was anxious, now, to see what opportunity I might have of unburdening myself of the growing anxiety and, perhaps, finding a state which I could make less awful than the misery I felt surrounding me.

The guide nodded, as though he understood what I had just decided without hearing it.

"Come."

As I ventured across the sea of bodies, I found the light I had known I would find. Even without the glow of the ghoul's staff, the eyes of each body had a minuscule light of their own. The light seemed white, only tainted, as though a mind-numbing grey would be the only sensation associated with the experience of oblivion.

I had thought that the guide would lead me to another passageway, but for seeming hours I walked across the dull, moaning masses. Finally, the guide stopped again. He was poised over a patch of sand not unlike that of the previous passages. I stepped out to join him on the sand when I realized that I now truly was being drawn deeper.

The sand-currents sucked me from my previous location too quickly to be denied or even fought. I was nothing more than a feather up against a windstorm, being pulled along however the overpowering forces chose.

At last the sand-stream began to slow, ebbing against the atmosphere of yet another passage. I had already lost track of the ghoul, now pushing wildly against the sand in an attempt to rejoin with the light.

At last I felt my body emerging from the sand, pushing into a new chamber. The coarse grains stung my eyes bitterly, making me now wish that, if I was unable to blink, at least I might wet my eyes with tears. But no fluid came, and I should earlier have realized that I would have no moisture in me. I was dead, still, and nothing could be as it had once been.

Aside from my sore eyes, the first thing that came to mind in this new chamber was the sound of rushing water-or what I assumed to be water-and a noticeable haze of mist in the air. The cyan glowed in this new environment, almost making for a tolerable light source.

The ghoul stood, waiting for me a few paces ahead. His cloak seemed to shield him from the very energy that nested in the tip of his staff, and this came to me as a comfort. Perhaps, somehow, one could manage to acclimate oneself to the tortures of hell?

I brushed myself off, now noticing the tension throughout my body. If this next chamber proved more horrific than the first? What then? Would I hold out until the final, most ghastly torture was selected? It was implied in the presentation that I would not have a chance to go back to ignorance, nor back to here from wherever my indecision took me.

The ghoul walked ahead as I trailed like a sulking child. I did not feel the need to know what gruesome sight I would soon see. I felt the need, the otherwise life-affirming urge, to escape. How much easier this all would be, were it only a matter of making a decision and forgetting the consequence... but that would be 'nihil', as he called it--I had already passed up my chance for release!

I further withdrew from my surroundings as he lead on. I was about to risk punishment and face down the incomprehensible demon that walked ahead of me when a marvelous white glow overtook me. It had been too faint at first to be seen, yet now my eyes bathed in this refreshing change of hues.

I realized now, too, that the ceiling of the cavern was for the first time visible. It shimmered equally with the walls in the sterile glow, even joining with the walls in places with the formation of stalactites and stalagmites. This coincided with the rushing sound of liquid gushing into the cavern, almost reminiscent of sounds I had heard in life.

The guide stepped up to the shore of the subterranean lake, motioning me to do the same. I stared at the clear, frothy liquid. Somewhere in this body were reactions taking place, reactions yielding the steady white light and vapors that now encompassed the light of the staff and enshrouded me in desperate hopes.

"This is a lake of fire. It's heat is immeasurable by the standard of terrestrial fire, for it is a lake of purest acid. Behold it, as the souls of those that here abide are devoured."

I saw a shimmering radius of white light slowing approach, floating under a layer of mist. The light grew closer, closer, almost a few paces from the shore. I peered into the frothy cauldron of evanescent liquid, attempting to see the source of the reaction and light. I shrunk back in disgust, momentarily, as a charred and blackened skeleton thrust itself out of the lake and attempted to claw its way across the sand.

Barely managing to escape unscathed from the storm of acid droplets the fiend had unleashed, I backed away and watched from a safer distance as the clawing bones were suddenly torn from the shore and dragged into the depths of the lake. This fate seemed all too wretched for me, I thought. Even the intense melancholy of numbness would precede this never-ending struggle and pain...

"Come." said my guide, satisfied with my reaction. "You have one last chance to decide upon your eternity."

I secretly hoped that this was a dream, despite the fact that it was sickeningly real. The ghoul walked the bank of the acid lake for only too long before a side-passage presented itself. I was increasingly hesitant to pass back into the darkness, hoping that perhaps some of the white light would follow but knowing it would not.

I was guided down a spiraling passage, deeper into the abyss than I had previously thought possible, until I came to a room so warmly lit that I was immediately hastened back to the initial sting of adjustment that had come with my arrival in the nether-realm. There were rows of beds lining the uniquely square walls, everything at unnatural angles.

Each of the beds was occupied by an individual, not unlike myself, completely aware of his or her surroundings and yet oblivious to the presence of either myself or the ghoul. They were all too busy with their current states, twisting and convulsing while strapped to the metal frames of their beds.

"Here you may rest under the constant watch of every affliction your kind has ever known..." said the guide, almost spiteful. "...You will never be attended to, except by disease."

I turned away from a particularly gangrenous leper whose out-stretched hand grasped at hope and death simultaneously. I shuddered to picture myself among their ranks, swelling and contorting in the throes of death's agony but held back from re-realizing that odd fulfillment. I absolutely could not join them in the frigid flourescent lighting and clean-white linens.

"You have reached no decision." said the ghoul. "Your destination has been chosen for you."

At that he stopped himself over a darkening area on the clacking tile floor. The tiles began to slip away beneath him, into darkness. I did not know what might await me, yet I knew that it was inescapable. I had given away my chance to decide, and now I was to face the full fury of hell.

The darkness below the guide was truly impenetrable, for I saw nothing even as I fell through the abyss. When I landed I found myself in utter darkness. There was not a sound, nor was there any solid object nearby that I could get my hands on. I groped about in the false night for what must have been hours, perhaps days.

That was when I laid my hands upon it, the most despicable of all hell's denizens. I put my hand fully around an armoured metallic body. It was not cold, but it seemed to drain the vigor from me even as I touched it. Like a snake, only it had hundreds upon hundreds of tiny, flailing legs on its underside.

I twisted it, jerked it, tried to snap it or extinguish the life inside it. It simply kept squirming. It was only too much like the desire I had subdued, the anxiety which had been building in me.

This nightmarishly unresponsive beast resembled too closely the insignificant worm I had become, attempting even as it spent an eternity in hell to find some form of release.