The Lovely Shadow (39 page)

Even with the beetles that were squirming
deep inside my ears, slowly chewing their way into my skull where
they could feast on my brain, I could hear the voices.

“Poison… Poison… Poison… Poison”

The chanting continued unceasingly for
millennia; the beetles chewed my agonized body, and finally wormed
their way into my skull after a million years of gnawing through
the tough cartilage of my inner ears, and at the same time they
began forcing their way up into my nostrils, and after another
millennium I felt them squirming behind my eyes.

Another hundred thousand years passed and the
beetles discovered that they could chew off my lips and enter my
mouth where they found easy access to my throat and easy passage
all the tasty morsels that lay at the bottom of my esophagus.

Or perhaps it only took a second. I’m not
sure. There’s no Time in Hell.

The voices chanted and the beetles chewed.
The voices never grew tired or hoarse and no matter how much flesh
the beetles consumed, it seemed that they never removed a single
ounce of flesh from me so there was always an available banquet for
them to dine upon.

There is no time in Hell and I’m not sure how
long these torments continued; thousands of years, perhaps, or
maybe only a second.

For a million years I scratched and clawed
and slapped myself in the darkness, flinging countless beetles off
my body, screaming silently and suffering a mouthful of beetles
every time I opened my mouth to scream. In the darkness the voices
continued to tell me I was poison.

My God, how I wished I had been insane.

After several billion years of torment, or
perhaps only a second, something changed. Screaming, scratching,
choking, and listening to the deafening cries of “Poison” in the
tar black pits of Hell I perceived a light!

The light blinded me in its intensity, even
though it seemed to be miles away. It was just a speck in the
distance and it illuminated nothing of my surroundings.

I continued to scratch and scream, and choke,
but kept my eyes focused on the light. I didn’t dare to hope that
the light meant anything other than a new and more destructive
torment. But in the infinity of dark torture, hope comes more
easily than it does in the world of light and shadows that I had
left only seconds before; or perhaps it was billions of years
before, and I found myself hoping against all odds.

The light seemed to take centuries to reach
me and as my eyes grew accustomed to the brightness of it I could
see that it appeared to be a translucent bubble, roughly the size
of a bowling ball, with rainbows swirling on its surface, giving
the impression that the bubble was rotating slowly left to right
and top to bottom.

The swirling, shining sphere floated directly
to me and stopped. When its light fell upon me in full force, the
millions of beetles that had been eating me for the past infinity
scurried away like cockroaches across the linoleum when the light
switch has been tripped.

From my flesh, from my nostrils, from my
mouth, and ears they fled. I felt them racing up my throat and out
of any available orifice in my head that they could find in their
desperation to flee the light that had stopped mere feet away from
me.

My eyes never left the orb in front of me but
my attention was still divided between it and the last of the bugs
as they fled from the light. When the final bug tried to scurry
away I saw it from the corner of my eye and stomped my foot upon
it, crushing the wicked life out of the tormenting devil with a
satisfying ‘crunch’.

When I heard the beast crunch beneath my foot
I realized that I was surrounded by silence for the first time
in…well I don’t know how long. The accusing voices had fled along
with the beetles.

I stared at the luminescent orb and tried to
find my voice to thank it. I didn’t know exactly what was in front
of me, but I was certain that it was most definitely good.

I had spent enough time—centuries or
seconds—in the presence of evil that I had an acute sensitivity to
the feel of it. The orb projected a completely opposite aura to
that of the evil that had invaded me.

The orb flooded me with light, warmth and an
indisputable feeling of love.

Even though the bubble emitted a powerfully
bright light, the light illuminated only me. There was only
blackness where the floor should have been, there were no walls,
and I cast no shadow.

The whole scene gave me the impression that I
was floating in space and I suffered a moment of vertigo as I
realized that what I had thought was floor was really just more
blackness.

I continued struggling to find my voice for
several seconds… seconds! I had regained a sense of time in the
presence of this benevolent being and the realization of that fact
pushed my voice even further down my throat.

Finally, after perhaps realizing that I was
speechless, or perhaps after finding its own voice after an
internal struggle of its own, the bubble spoke to me.

“Hello, Johnny. Have you missed Mommy?”

I was unaware that is was possible to pass
out when you were dead and trapped in the pits of Hell, but that is
exactly what I did.

When I came to I had fully expected the whole
thing to have been some kind of nightmare. I figured that I was
going to wake up and find myself back at the farm, with June still
alive, her cancer still in remission, and Elle waiting happily for
me to die.

When I opened my eyes, I saw a glowing bubble
silhouetted against a curtain of impossible darkness.

I sat up from the nonexistent floor where I
had tumbled to and stared at the orb. The orb pulsed in response,
as if it were acknowledging my look with a slight head nod.

Somehow I managed to find my voice and I
croaked, “Mama?”

“Yes,” the orb replied.

I knew in that moment that it was my mother’s
consciousness that stood before me; her soul’s soul so to speak. My
voice took on an acerbic edge when I next spoke

“You’re in Hell, Mama. With me…Am I your
Hell, Mama?”

Feelings that I had repressed since the age
of seven—for millennia, or perhaps only for years, I’m not sure
which—bubbled to the surface and I was unable to keep the anger
from my voice as I spit those words at her.

Instead of striking back with a spiteful
comment of her own, my mother’s orb simply seemed to deflate
slightly. The projection of love that I had felt did not diminish,
and did not transform into anger. If anything, the sense of love
that I felt grew only more poignant.

“I thought you were, once. I was wrong. I was
my own Hell, you could have been my salvation if I would have
allowed it, but I was blinded by my own selfishness.”

“Why, Mama,” I asked, with tears rising in my
eyes, (I was as unaware that a person could cry in Hell as I had
been about fainting in Hell) “Why did you let the Sickness take
you? Why did you let the Sickness beat me? Why did you let the
Sickness torture me? Humiliate me? WHY DID YOU LET THE SICKNESS
ABANDON ME IN THE DARK?”

I had assumed that I would never be allowed a
proper accounting for my mother’s actions in my youth, and now,
faced with an orb that spoke in a voice that was undeniably my
mother’s I had an opportunity to get the answers I had sought.

My mother’s orb diminished in brightness with
every question I threw at it, and eventually grew so dim that it
would have been invisible anywhere else but in the utter
darkness.

“Johnny, please forgive me. There is no
acceptable answer to those questions. I was lost in despair and
when the Sickness came, it felt like relief. I didn’t understand
that the Sickness filled me with Poison.”

“Ignorance of my actions does not excuse my
actions, my Son. Yet I have no better answer to give you. I am so
sorry.”

I stood in the darkness glaring at my
mother’s deepest soul and was overcome by the realization that the
deep soul (or consciousness) can not lie.

When my mother told me that she did not know
what she was doing, when she begged forgiveness, and when she
apologized, she meant every word of it from the very deepest part
of her being—her soul’s soul.

I felt my anger melt, and true forgiveness
entered my heart at last. For years, or centuries, I’m not sure
which, I had lived (and died) with the assumption that I had
forgiven my mother, but I had not really.

I’m not sure I ever could have forgiven her
fully without this moment of realization that she was honestly
repentant. For a brief glimmering second (yes just a very, very
brief second) I was happy to have met my mother in Hell, so I could
finally find full forgiveness for her.

It also helped that she’d managed to chase
away the Dermestid beetles that had been eating me alive for
eons.

“I forgive you, Mama. For real this time.
From the bottom of my heart, Mama, I forgive you.”

My mother’s orb shimmered and vibrated in
front of me and I had the impression that she was weeping, though
she made no sound and had no bodily features to prove my
theory.

“Thank you Johnny. You have granted me the
one thing that I have always needed, but never deserved. I can
disappear into the void now, at peace.”

“What do you mean disappear?”

My mother’s orb drifted towards me and
hovered only inches from my nose. In its shimmering, swirling
surface I caught a glimpse of my mother’s young face, before the
Sickness took her, smiling at me with tears streaming down her
cheeks.

Her lips moved as she whispered to me, “I
love you more than existence, Johnny.”

With those words her orb made contact with me
and seemed to enter into me. I felt like I was being electrocuted.
My entire being convulsed with the charge that was flowing through
me. I lost all control of my muscles and fell backwards, stiff as a
board.

Instead of impacting the invisible floor as I
had when I passed out I felt myself hovering. Every muscle was
tensed; my arms and legs pointing straight out away from my
torso.

I began to rotate slowly and I opened my
mouth to scream in terror. I didn’t know what my mother was doing
to me, and it didn’t hurt per se, but it wasn’t exactly as pleasing
as a deep tissue massage might have been.

When my mother entered me I was once again
engulfed by darkness, when I opened my mouth to scream, a beam of
light shot out of it rather than a stream of sound. I could sense
the same blinding light behind my eyes, which caused my vision to
become tinted with a red haze.

Light shot out of my nostrils and my ears,
and finally burst out of my eyes as well. I began to rotate faster.
I spun so fast that I could feel the centrifugal force pulling
desperately at all my extremities, creating unnatural pressure in
places where there had never been pressure before.

Eventually the tips of my fingers burst with
the pressure, but instead of flinging blood, beams of bright white
light shot out of the wounds. My toes were the next thing to burst
with blinding light, and finally my head exploded, illuminating the
entirety of Hell with infinite streams of blinding light that I
could still perceive, even though I had no eyes left to see
with.

I think this was the point at which I passed
out again.

When I came to again I found myself squinting
against the brightness of a summer sky and the immeasurably
beautiful face of Elle staring down at me.

“YOU IDIOT!” she screamed at me, “You could
have been killed!”

Knowing that it was not going to go over
well, but unable to contain myself in spite of the danger, I
laughed out loud. I laughed long and deep, and the more I laughed,
the more Elle’s face twisted and contorted into shapes of
unimaginable depths of anger, and the harder I had to laugh.

I’ve got to hand it to Elle, though she was
absolutely furious with my recklessness, and even more so by my
laughter, she never moved away from me, which was wonderful for me,
for as my laughing fit finally subsided, I was able to raise my
head only slightly and plant a big, sloppy kiss squarely upon her
lips.

“Hello, Darling,” I said after removing my
lips from hers. “Did you miss me?”

“Johnny Krimshaw! You infuriating,
sonofa…you…I should kill you just for surviving!”

Elle was so angry that she could only barely
make coherent words, which I found vastly amusing. Everything was
vastly amusing.

The sun was warmer, the grass greener, the
sky bluer, and my love for Elle sweeter than I had ever known them
to be. But I suppose after spending a billion years—or perhaps only
seconds—in Hell, everything is bound to seem wonderful by
comparison.

I did not dare try to explain to Elle where I
had been or what I had been up to, for if she knew the truth of how
close we had come to being eternally separated she would likely
never forgive me.

Perhaps when she reads this manuscript she
will have calmed herself down enough to find forgiveness for me, or
perhaps even amusement, but whether she will or not doesn’t change
the fact that I was not a brave enough soul to tell her about my
experience on that day, and have not found the courage to do so in
all the years since.

I sat up and dusted myself off. I was covered
with shards of glass and had some serious grass stains on my hands
and knees, and, according to Elle, on the top of my head.

“Come on Darling,” I said casually, ignoring
Elle’s anger for the moment, “let’s take a walk to the pond.”

Elle gave me the most exasperated look I’d
ever seen on a person, either living or dead, but consented to hold
my hand as we walked silently towards the pond.

We sat beneath the great willow and I basked
in the contrasting sensations of warm sunlight that shone on my
body through gaps in the branches, and cool shadow where the sun
was unable to penetrate the canopy.