“Yes, yes go on, hurry,” the Hermit urged.
“But—”
“Just do it,” said the Devil, “it’s the only way he’ll show you—him and his foolish card games.”
Reluctantly, I reached out my brittle hand and chose my cards, one after the other and very slowly. The Hermit took the first card and placed it alone, face up.
“Ooh, a good one,” the Hermit said, grinning. “For ‘The Sin’ you chose ‘wrath’.” And then he flipped over the second card and placed it after the first. “And for ‘The Crime’ you chose...hmmm, how cliché.” He sucked on a tooth, in thought. “I had hoped for something more...hmmm, something more
exciting
.”
I looked upon the card in question and although the title seemed to be in Latin, the moving picture of a man wearing rags and holding a bloody dagger in his left hand led me to believe the words in Latin read ‘murder’, or any variation of the word.
“I’m truly annoyed,” the Hermit added. “Why couldn’t he have mixed it up a little, chose something like lust and theft. You know, I got one like that not long ago and the Hell I made for him was one of my best!”
The Hermit started to go into the details, but the Devil stopped him.
“Please,” the Devil said, shaking his head, “let’s get on with this. We’ve got to be back soon.” He tapped his wrist as if tapping a watch.
“Oh, alright.”
The Hermit took my last card, flipped it face-up and placed it next to the second.
“And it just gets worse,” the Hermit said with a sigh and a snarl. “Very well, for ‘The Punishment’ you chose ‘confinement’.”
And then the Hermit stood and began to pace.
“Ah!” he shouted suddenly. “I have just the Hell for you to see! Not one of my best, but for someone like you, who feels bad for stepping on a spider, the Hell of Samuel J. Hennicot should serve its purpose.”
Swiftly, the Hermit shifted his look toward the Devil. “And if it doesn’t, then too goddamned bad.”
The Devil said nothing.
I raised my head and saw that I was not sitting with the Devil and the Hermit anymore.
Stone walls and cell bars surrounded me. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a dirty pool of water near my bare feet. I was not me anymore, old or young. And when I tried to speak, or even just rise to stand and look out the tall black bars that held me prisoner, I knew I was nobody here; only a guest in the body of someone who had been damned. Within seconds, I felt this man’s pain and regret as if it were my own. I could see the pictures in the man’s mind as though they were images I had conjured myself. The woman with long, flowing hair. The way she ran through the courtyard, free and innocent like a child. The radiant smile, the contagious laughter. The side of her face bashed in.
I, as Samuel shook off the memory.
“And what do you regret most?” said a guard.
Samuel lowered his head; his long, black hair fell near his eyes. “I regret meeting her,” he said. “I regret the scent of her hair, the softness of her skin.” He looked up at the hooded guard standing near him. “I regret killing her, but then it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve always destroyed everything I’ve ever loved.”
The guard turned his back to Samuel, a large cluttered set of rusted keys jangling in his hand. The shuffling of rats in the cell next door became a constant companion in this dark and dank room befitting a murderer. Above him, hanging from the metal rail of his bed was a chain necklace, adorned with The Crucifixion of Christ somewhere underneath the beaten silver that had lost its shine so long ago. Dried in the crevices of Christ’s hair was the blood of Antissa.
In the corner of his eye, Samuel could see the movement of the guard’s hands underneath his draping sleeves, motioning for him to stand. Voices, cries of pain and maniacal laughter echoed through the hallway, but to Samuel they were hardly audible. The reality of this time had done its job to drown out almost everything else around him. There was little light in this cell, save for a flickering bulb somewhere in the distance. Oh, how Samuel would have loved to have had a cell with a small box window so that he could look upon the moon one last time.
He stood, crossing his hands chained at the wrists and I could feel the penetrating cold of the metal down into my bones as though they were my hands.
“The final hour approaches,” said the guard, and in his voice there was a hiss. “Come.”
The guard pushed open the steel doors; a screeching echo filled the dungeon. Blood curdling screams pierced every cell. Footsteps were oddly booming in Samuel’s ears, just like the sound of water dripping and rats chewing the bones of carcasses. The stench of rotten flesh was a punishment in and of itself, enough to make the eyes water and sting.
Samuel followed the guard out into the hall, seeing for the first time in ages those who had been his neighbors. Flashes penetrated his mind, pictures of these strange people that were so familiar, yet so foreign.
“We are nearly there,” said the guard.
The guard never looked directly at him, but to Samuel it felt like his eyes were always on him, following his every trembling move.
“What will you do when you see her?”
“See who?” Samuel turned toward the guard, slightly perplexed.
“Antissa,” the guard answered with that eerie hiss. “She waits for you at the end of the stair, like she always does.”
The guard looked directly at Samuel this time, but no face could be seen. Only blackness appeared to lurk behind that old hood. “Ad infinitum,” the guard added and began to walk again.
“But I don’t understand any of this.”
“You will soon, only to forget again. But what will you say to Antissa when you see her again, Samuel?”
Samuel could not answer; the moment was too surreal for him to fathom. It felt to him as though he had been here before, doing the same thing as he and the guard descended the rock stairs that seemed endless. All sense of time was consumed by the darkness and the wind around them. The air was cold and dusty in the back of his throat. The shackles binding his ankles weighed down his already slow-paced steps, and there he saw her, Antissa, standing at the bottom of the stair waiting for him. His shackles were gone as though they had never been there, and he walked toward her, the woman that he had loved all his long life but could never have. She had been married to his younger brother, John, who just happened to be the unattractive of the two. Samuel always got the women; those he never wanted anything more from than the sweetness between their legs. Samuel was the accomplished brother, for John had barely completed college and had no talent whatsoever, unless smoking pot was a talent. Samuel drove the nice car. John rode an expensive bike. It was a no-brainer: why would someone like Antissa, blond and beautiful, soft and pure with the prettiest emerald eyes Samuel had ever seen, choose John over him?
“I’m sorry, Sam,” said Antissa. “I didn’t know you felt that way about me.”
“I’ve always loved you; since we were kids. I wanted you long before my idiot brother, who was too busy molesting his surfboard to notice you.”
Antissa’s face was gentle and compassionate. “But when did you, Sam? I don’t recall it. I’m so very sorry.”
Samuel felt a ticking in his head, and I felt it too, just as I was feeling everything that Samuel was feeling. I could feel the rage begin as a spot just at the back of my head. The ticking grew and became his voice, the evil Samuel fighting with his better half, and winning.
“That doesn’t matter now,” Samuel said with such defeat. “I’ll never know what it’s like to be with you.”
Antissa softly shut her eyes. Her skin was so soft that Samuel knew it must feel like heaven to touch it. Her innocence was of a simple perfection, the kind that only few souls truly possess in the world. How could one human being utterly tear a man down with only a glance?
Samuel gritted his teeth. He could not stand it any longer, and I felt this sudden dread overtake him. Overtake me. Something horrible was about to happen and Samuel was going to be the one to do it. I could do nothing to stop it, the pain and anger far too great to be contained.
“Kill her!” said a voice so close that Samuel could feel its hot breath on his ear. “Cut her up in little pieces, Samuel. Bash her fucking brains in until she’s dead, dead, dead!”
I felt Samuel’s mind on the verge of exploding and I tried to stop him, to get out of Samuel’s body, but the only control I had was my ability to see and feel, knowing I could do absolutely nothing to help her.
In a flash Antissa was falling. The blond of her silk hair soiled quickly by the color of blood. The first blow had come too fast for Antissa to react, hitting her so severely that the crushed skull rendered her powerless to scream. Samuel threw himself on top of her, raining blow after blow with a heavy object that might have been a paperweight, or a bookend. Samuel never knew what he had killed her with, a detail insignificant in comparison to its final use.
I would have fainted if fainting was allowed, but throughout the brutal murder, I felt my own mind slipping further and further away from me. I could feel myself raising my own hands in rage and the weight of the bloodied object grasped in my fingers. Before long, Samuel and I were completely the same. I screamed out Antissa’s name as I hit her. The sound of her face crushing under the weight of the murder weapon was not horrific now, but satisfying. Her beautiful emerald eyes were smashed beyond recognition into the crushed bone of her skull.
And then I stopped.
I looked down at the lifeless body of Antissa between my legs as I held the murder weapon high above my head. At first, I was confused. What was going on? What had I done? And then, like that first blow Samuel used to knock Antissa from her feet, I was hit with the cruel realization of what Samuel had just committed, what I had just committed. Rage turned to regret and pain, the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. I wanted to die right then, but also I wanted to hold her again in my arms. I carefully pulled Antissa’s body into my lap and rocked her. I cried and cried until my stomach ached so terribly that I could feel it in my legs and in the top of my head. And it was in this moment that Samuel J. Hennicot knew where he was and what was about to happen to him all over again.
I looked up at the hooded figures all around us.
“No,” Samuel begged, “no, please; I can’t go through this again. Please!”
“But it is the consequence of your deeds,” said the hooded guard who brought him here from the cell. “You must suffer as Antissa suffered. As you will again and again until Hell Eternal comes to swallow you up into its abysmal belly.”
“No!” Samuel dropped Antissa’s body from his lap and went to raise himself from his knees, but the hooded guards were upon him too quickly. They bashed his head in repeatedly with the same mysterious object—each of them had one—that Samuel had used to kill Antissa. But he did not die as quickly as Antissa died; no, I as Samuel, was made to endure the pain for a time that felt like forever.
…I woke up in a dank and musty cell where I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a dirty pool of water near my bare feet....
“So, would you like to choose again?” said the Hermit.
I raised my head and saw that I was myself again, sitting with the Devil and the Hermit in the terrible wasteland that hid the cruelest of realities. Suddenly, I fell off the rock I had been using as a chair and vomited so violently and for so long that it felt like my insides had come out with it. I couldn’t speak, or move, or think.
“I guess not, eh?” the Hermit sniffled and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his robe. “Why did you come here, anyway, Lucifer?”
The Devil took me by the shoulder and helped me to my feet, but it was more a gesture to hurry me along rather than one to help me.
“I’m ready to face the truth,” I answered. “Take me back...please...just take me out of here.”
“Bah!” said the Hermit and he turned his back to me.