Highway To Hell (20 page)

“You turned and walked away from us. The fight was over and you turned heels and took your men away from danger.” The two women continued to convey the words of the mysterious narrator whose face he dared not show. Their bodies were thin and haggard, their arms and legs so tiny it looked as though they would break if they had to so much as hold each other’s hands. Their hair was matted and filled with leaves and twigs.

“I thought you were dead,” Graham said, his voice beginning to crumble. “With all the gunfire we just thought you were dead.” He could feel the warm, salty tears stinging his eyes. Graham tried as hard as he could not to let them fall. It was unavoidable. Not because he was angry or because what he saw upset him, but because he was lying. He hadn’t thought that they were dead, not back then, not at the moment. Truth be told he had simply forgotten them, he had been happy to survive and wanted to get himself and his men (although if you asked him at the time, he would have said that they too were expendable) away from the encounter and back to the rest of the unit. There was comfort in numbers. It wasn’t until much later, as they sat around a makeshift table playing cards for cigarettes, that the family came back into his head. It was then, at that point and no sooner, that Graham convinced himself that they had died. They had been dead as soon as they had been pulled from the church, the rest was just a faded memory; selective, they called it. It helped him sleep a little that night, and over the years it simply became truth.

“No, no, we were alive, and scared. We were alone, our shelter and food taken from us. We were forced to stand there through the cold nights, the wet days.” The words were accusatory, barbed and meant to hurt. Then it went silent. Their voices muted, and then his voice returned.

“It was starvation and dehydration that took them. It ravaged their bodies and melted their minds long before their hearts stopped. They died cold, alone, and still believing that you would come back for them.” The words cut Graham like a hot knife. He tried to tell himself that they were dead, nothing could bring them back anymore. It was too late: the damage had been done in Graham’s mind. The floodgates opened and try as he might, Graham could do nothing to stop it.

“I’m sorry. I never stopped thinking about you, both of you. It was because of you, Johanna, that I became a teacher. I taught children your age. I wanted to help them understand life, not just in terms of schooling but in the broader terms of reality. I helped prepare them for everything life would throw at them, not just the standardized do not copy your neighbor’s answer kind of problems but real issues. You saved my life. I got out of the military as soon as the war was over and I never looked back. You stayed in my dreams until the end and I mean that.” Graham felt his emotion building but his words were cut off. His windpipe closed as if someone had shoved a cork down his gullet. His lungs began to burn and although he was dead Graham felt his heart begin to race. His face grew dark, his limbs heavy; his thumbs and fingers became useless, fat sausages that dangled from his arms in bunches like fruits on a tree.

“I know what you did; I see everything. Don’t you get it? I didn’t create these images; I just found them in your mind and pressed play. It’s my job to ensure that you see everything in the stark, unrepentant light of day. I am merely the tour guide, here to keep you on track and, well... maybe have a bit of fun with you on the way.” The pressure around Graham’s throat abated and as he gasped for air with burning gulps, his captor continued to talk.

“I don’t care about them and neither should you. They died, you lived, and that’s all that matters in your petty human world. Believe me, down here, it’s remarkably similar. I would cast my own brother into the pit of Assisi if it would help me advance another level down. Your real problem is what happened to you because of that day,” the voice said, but no longer boomed or demanded. To Graham it sounded like the narrator of a game show.

“I don’t understand. I let those innocent people die; I did desert them. I deserve to be here… more than I realized.” Graham felt his resolve crumble faster than the walls of the church that had been the tomb of a father, his only son, and youngest daughter back in 1944.

“Humans, you are so pathetic, with your crude emotions and your lack of control. You’re not in Hell; not yet, at least. You are here to be judged. I am not the executioner, but merely the messenger; a bailiff, if you will. They would have died from their malnutrition even if you had have taken them with you. I mean, come on, the lives of a couple of poor farming women is of no interest to me or anybody down here. If anything, I, personally speaking, applaud your actions that day. No, you are here because you gave up on God. You surrendered all your belief in Him, your fear of Him after that day. Your life became about helping others, but not for a cause any less selfish than trying to fill that gnawing hole left inside you where your faith had once been,” the voice lectured now, and Graham imagined him as a tweed-wearing History teacher, not unlike Robert Carmichael, the History department head back at his first ever high school teaching job. It didn’t make the situation any less daunting but it gave Graham a base from which he could conjure an image to fit the floating voice.

“God, I never forgot God or stopped believing in Him; I just decided that He’s a cocksucker and only interested in seeing people suffer. Eradicating that sadistic son of a bitch from my decision making took my life and turned it into something enjoyable. So if you ask me if I believe, then yes, of course I do. I always did. If you ask me what I would do if I got to the pearly gates, then I would love to kick my bearded creator a swift kick in the bollocks and then go find my wife,” Graham spat. Now it was his turn to feel enraged. Not because of the questioning and not as a result of the images he had seen, but simply because he had been forced to empty himself. He could feel the atmosphere working on him, ridding his body of the pent up emotion and aggression, rendering him passive, empty and tired, making him easy pickings for whatever lay ahead.

“Yes, yes, I find it all very intriguing but also so incredibly...
boring
.” The voice roared the last word. “If you do not fear God, then you cannot fear us, and if people stopped fearing us, then, well, Hell wouldn’t be as much fun, now, would it? Sure, it would still exist, and yes, business would pick up with all the holy defectors, but fear is kind of what we do down here; it is what drives us. The terror helps us survive and keeps us all functioning.”

Graham opened his mouth to speak but the voice snapped, barking at him in the snarling voice of an old man. “Be an end to it. I am bored with you now. Your ghosts are simple, your past pathetic, and I no longer have an interest in you. You will learn of your mistakes in the Chamber of Blood. Now get out of my sight.”

There was no goodbye, no cackling laughter as Graham had half expected. There was nothing but a rushing wind. Graham began to fall. His restraints had vanished, so too the chair. Graham fell into the darkness and the walls turned from black to purple, from purple to red, and finally from red to a burning blood orange. It didn’t take long before Graham hit the ground… no, not ground, but water, a sea, a vast sea (or lake) and was swallowed by it whole. Graham was effortlessly sucked deep beneath its surface.

When he broke the surface of the water, Graham struggled and flapped with his arms. They seemed to respond to his commands with the same conviction a toddler shows when listening to its parents. He sank beneath the surface again, pulled – or so it felt – by hands grasping at the newest member of their clan. Graham’s body called out in agony, his chest tightened, his vision faded, and yet his thoughts seemed to clarify. He saw the field and the church, the way it had been before they arrived. It was a beautiful sight. With that in his mind, Graham let go. He stopped his struggles and allowed himself to sink. Eager hands tightened their grip on his ankles and pulled him deeper. He opened his mouth. The taste of copper hit the back of his throat and surged down his gullet. Then suddenly he was propelled upwards, pushed by some hidden force. Graham rose fast and broke the water, coughing and spluttering, gasping for air. For a few moments he wheezed and gulped, and after a while began to regain control. Graham trod water and looked around, panicked that they would grab at him again. He saw no signs of a shoreline, but the rough undulating surface could easily have hidden land from view; Graham decided he was in an ocean, for he had never seen anything other than sea so rough and untamed. Only the water was not the crisp blue of the tropics, or even the sewage green of the seas around Europe, but red. It didn’t take long for Graham to realize the sea was blood, and he was nothing more than a clot in the system, destined to end up wherever the tide would take him.

There was an obvious current beneath him; Graham could feel the gore pulling at him, and so he decided to swim with it. He began to paddle, his body covered in rapidly congealing blood. Thick clots tried to stick his eyelids together. His nose was blocked with blacked lumps of jelly, and he had swallowed more than he cared to think about; his mouth tasted as though he had bitten down a handful of old pennies.

Graham had no idea how long he swam: all he knew was that he was tired. Not just I’ve had a long day at work tired, but worn out, falling apart tired, exhausted to the point where further movement was not just hard but impossible.

When he first arrived in the world, it had been silent. Even the blood ocean with its pink froth capped waves had made no sound. Yet now, as he swam heading towards what he hoped would be the shore, Graham realized that the silence was being replaced by an eerie groaning, the same sound one hears in old houses or in pipes long since due a service. It was carried on the air, it travelled through the ocean, it fell from the sky, an all-encompassing cry. It was that of tortured souls screaming, cries of lust, sin and hatred all boiled together.

He stopped swimming, and Graham noticed that every part of him that was below the surface was completely numb. It had been a warm, bordering on burning sensation at first, but now all feeling had gone. He was tired, exhausted, and there was part of him that wanted to be taken by the sea, to simply sink away again to the bottom of the bloody ocean and drown in the fluid of life. It all seemed rather poetic to him. Yet just as he made the decision to let his body go, the water began to ripple around him. It spread in circles as if a helicopter was moving into position to pluck him from the sea. A bright light appeared, bathing Graham in a pure brilliance; a searchlight, or so his natural inclination and rational mind suggested. Out of nowhere, a pair of hands grasped him, not by the feet this time, but by the shoulder. The grip was powerful and the nails felt like sharp talons as they dug into Graham’s flesh, not breaking the skin but pinching to the point of penetration. Graham felt himself begin to rise above the waves. He was plucked effortlessly from the ocean. It looked as if he had been bathing in a barrel of beetroot for weeks. He rose higher and higher, not moving in any direction other than along the vertical. Graham looked down and saw for the first time how vast it all was. The ocean stretched out in all directions, and squint as he might, there was not even the faintest trace of land on the horizon.

Graham could make out small islands dotted around, and he could see people, souls like himself, swimming, some against the tide, some with it, all heading towards what they hoped to be salvation. They rose another few feet and Graham realized that they weren’t islands, but rather giant floating clots that drifted on the surface of the water. Graham could see people clinging to them. He could feel their anguish and hear their groans as they realized that salvation didn’t exist, not anymore. He saw sprays of pink foam shooting high into the air just before large grey beasts leapt from beneath the surface, consuming entire groups of people, even entire ‘islands’ inside their cavernous mouths. Some had fins, and others looked like giant frog/whale hybrids. Some had several heads and some to Graham’s shock seemed to have no heads at all. One end simply opened into a giant mouth like an amphibious worm.

There was something else. Graham noticed it just at the end, just as they reached a height where things all became indistinguishable: beneath the surface, when the ocean was flat and the waves staved off, he could see them, hundreds, thousands, no, probably hundreds of millions of faces staring up through the red liquid. Their arms were outstretched as they grasped upwards, reaching not for the surface but for more bodies, for new arrivals. They were waiting to take a hold and pull them down. To sink them to the Hemoglobic Ocean floor, and in turn lift themselves slightly higher, back to the surface, to their second chance. They were the faces of those who, like Graham, simply gave up and sank. They didn’t die, but were made to wait, to gather those that joined their hopeless cause and climb back up and restart their epic journey in the hope of finding… anything.

“What the hell is this?” Graham asked, not realizing he was speaking aloud, his consciousness drifting away from him.

“One of the Blood Seas, pools that are filled with the remains of those skinned in the Chamber of Blood,” a patient sounding voice answered him. There was no malice in it, no hidden scheming lust for suffering, but simply an honest answer to an honest yet terrifying question.

With the answer still filtering through his mind, Graham felt everything slip away from him. All his fears and thoughts wiped out of his mind, replaced by a feeling much akin to sleep, and when it hit, Graham welcomed it with open arms.

~

PART II

A GREAT HALL IN A DYING WORLD

~

CHAPTER 3

I

Helen’s eyes sprung open, panicked. She sat bolt upright; the sensation of being unrestrained scared her at first. After so many years of being bound and immobile the sudden range of motion her body was given was too much for her and she collapsed back down onto the hard floor.