I paced the courtyard, and looked again at those thorny plants that grew in its center, the ivy-like vines with purplish leaves which smothered one of the metal walls that enclosed us. Was any of it edible? I hadn’t eaten in five days. This cloned or illusory body of mine hungered desperately, though I was sure I didn’t require sustenance or fuel. My body had been given the same needs and drives only so that I could suffer hunger, pain…as I had in life. Five long days. I must say now that I can’t really be certain it has been five days, because of course there is no sun down here. Assuming this place is indeed "down", though I’m sure it isn’t simply beneath the Earth’s crust. Another dimension or plane, an elsewhere beyond my sense of space and time. But I’m trying to make it conform to my limited sense of time by relying on my bogus body’s internal clock, which seems to tell me that five days have passed. Also, each "day" here has one extra-long period in between our classes that I consider to be night. Maybe that is when the Demons themselves rest. As I’ve said, these breaks between classes cannot be considered rest for us, since giving one a period of rest is an act of concern, and mercy.
I came close to the wall blanketed in those purple tendrils, and I rubbed one of the waxy leaves between my fingers. A glance over my shoulder, then I plucked one, nibbled it. It tasted like something rotten and I spat it out. Even the smell from the snapped stem reeked, almost more like an animal flattened in the street than rotting vegetable matter. A single drop of blood welled from the broken stem. I didn’t want to know what these plants really were, or once were.
But that was when I spotted the mantis, picking its way carefully across the glossy leaves. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it hadn’t moved, because it was camouflaged the same dark purple color. Also, its limbs had these exaggerated flanges so that they looked like leaves of some kind, themselves.
Though I had been branded on the forehead and badly beaten over the past five pseudo-days, I was afraid to touch this bug in case it bit me. But I forced myself to get past that, and put out my hand in front of the large insect. At first it tried to go around, but at last I got it to crawl over my hand and onto my sleeve, where it seemed to go still out of disoriented wariness. I moved it closer to my face for inspection.
So did Hell have its own indigenous animal forms, I wondered? Surely animals didn’t go to Hell, simply because they are weren’t sophisticated enough to acknowledge their Creator? Was there a separate but approximate ecology down here? Had this mantis, then,
evolved
to its current state? Adapted its camouflaged color and shape? Didn’t evolution contradict the very existence of Hell?
The simple, terrestrial-looking creature mystified me, suddenly, more than these walls of iron that reared about me. That flaming Demon statue in the courtyard’s center. The sky of smoke that I’d never seen clear. It was an enigma. Was it some human sufferer, transformed? Or did the Creator simply mold such things "down here" as He did "up there"…out of sheer artistic gratification? How could any Being so in love with blowing life into protoplasm the way a glassblower shapes vessels with his life’s breath be so cruel as to sentence his complex masterpieces to a world of eternal agony?
Then again, why do some people have children, only to end up molesting or even killing their own offspring? Did the Father simply enjoy the act of creation as we enjoy the act of procreation?
Was our Father, then, merely an abusive parent? A psychotic parent?
The mantis’s jagged forelimbs were bent up close to its armored chest in mock prayer. As though He had contorted its form out of His narcissistic need to make things bow to His own glory. All creation was a mirror for His vanity, but when He didn’t like the flawed reflection there, He shattered the glass. Blaming the mirror for its ugliness.
A distant rumble of thunder was followed by the nearer thunder of a door opening in one of the metal walls. Huge exposed gears and cogs turned gratingly as that panel screeched open. A hiss of released steam, and I turned to see three figures emerge from the steam into the courtyard. It was one of our instructors, accompanied by two lesser Demons who might have been assistants, bodyguards, instructors in training, or satellite-like extensions of his own body, for all I knew. They, like him, wore flowing ebony robes over chitinous black bodies armored and segmented like those of insects masquerading as skeletons. The central Demon was eight feet tall but skinny as my eight-year-old niece. His robe’s shoulders were padded and tented via some hidden framework, however, to give him a more impressive bulk. He carried a black iron staff with a bizarre crest or symbol at its head, like a splatter of calligraphy translated into metal. His face was that of a mummified skull, withered lips drawn back from a grimace of black teeth, but tiny eyes without an iris or pupil glowed a brilliant white in those gaping sockets. Atop his head he wore a tall miter made of metal, and its sides were full of holes in ornate designs. Through these grate-like holes in this headdress, one could see the green fire raging from the top of the Demon’s skull.
This volcanic orifice was more apparent in the two lesser Demons. They were merely six feet tall, and their robes did not have the bulky shoulders, nor did they carry a staff of office or whatever that was. They were also like charred, reanimated skeletons though the bright pinpricks of their eyes were not as piercing as their leader’s. They didn’t wear a miter or any other head covering, so I could see the opening in the top of their skulls as if the bone had been sawed away. Smoke wisped out of their holes; not that gaseous flame that jetted from the professor’s head, though this smoke glowed greenish as though their brains were made from some luminous, primordial ooze.
The Demon trio stopped on the flagstones, and the instructor tapped his staff’s end loudly three times, gathering us to him. I was one of the nearest, and I approached them holding out the mantis that clung to my sleeve.
"Master," I addressed him in what I hoped was an appropriately meek and respectful tone. (Not that I had to fake the meekness.) Sucking up like a new employee. "I found this insect. I wanted to ask you what it is…why it’s here…"
Perhaps the professor would appreciate my curiosity. A pupil eager for knowledge.
The others hung back behind me. I was a step or two ahead of them. And the two lesser Demons remained where they were while their leader closed more of the distance between us, until he loomed directly before me. From on high, he tilted his head to gaze expressionlessly down at the animal on my arm.
When the Demon spoke, his words were a hissing like the warning of a cobra. Like a cold draft blowing through a tomb. A scratchy, rustling sound…as if dead autumn leaves were being scuffed about by the wind in that tomb. He said, "You have answered your own question. It is an insect, as you are. It is here, as you are. The Creator is not obligated to make plain to you His design. His acts are beyond your comprehension, should He even care to explain them, which He does not."
With that, the professor put his other claw-like hand on his staff, and brought it down in a blurred black whoosh. That enigmatic design which crested it neatly sliced through my forearm. I saw half my arm drop to my feet, with the mantis still clinging to it. Blood geysered from my remaining stump like water from a fireman’s hose. I stumbled backward, struck my heel against a flagstone, fell heavily onto my back, wailing in agony, tears streaming from my eyes. But even in my blinding nova-blast of pain, I knew better than to ask my fellows for help. They stood watching me, helpless, horrified, and glad it wasn’t them.
"You need know only what we deem to instruct you. And that is the fact that you are an insect yourself," the towering Demon went on, in that dry rasp.
To conclude this little impromptu lesson, my teacher raised his bony bare foot and stomped on my severed arm. Crushing the mantis, in so doing. It was an act as mysterious to me as the existence of the mantis itself.
By the time it was what I took to be night, my right arm had regenerated to the point that I was able to begin this journal. Thank the Creator for small miracles.
Day 6 (Days 1 - 4).
Because I began my journal so late, I suppose I should go back at this point and fill in the blanks…begin at the beginning just to get myself quickly caught up to where I am now. Luckily most of it is a blur of pain and fear, anyway. I can’t believe I’m as sane now as I am, considering the panic and desperation I experienced in those first few days. Maybe my mind regenerated the way my flesh and bones do.
I woke up alone in a tiny room that was covered entirely in white ceramic tiles, even the ceiling and floor. At first, I thought I was in a hospital. After all, I had just propped a shotgun barrel under my chin and blown the top of my head off. When I swallowed, it was blood and teeth and loose gobs of flesh; a goodly portion of my decimated brain slid down my gullet like an oyster on the half shell. But why, if I were in a hospital, did I lie naked on the floor, my blood running toward a steel drain in its center?
I tried to sit up, but the nuclear explosion of pain was so immense that I fell back onto my side. I heard the burst piñata of my skull splat against the tiles. How could I still be alive?
Of course, I wasn’t.
And when a bright steel submarine-type hatch in one wall of the room opened with a hiss of steam, and the first Demon entered my shower stall-like cell, then I knew things were not what I had counted on when I made that teary, self-pitying decision. I thought it would be the last pain I would ever have to suffer; a microsecond of inferno in my skull, then sweet oblivion. It had been hard enough just to face that microsecond. Just to screw up my courage for that. But this…this…how could I face it, especially without much left for a face?
I couldn’t even scream as a pair of Demons, now, took hold of me. They dragged me out of what I assume was one of many, many points of deposit for souls when they cross over. We each arrive in one of these white coffin-like rooms, alone, before being transferred to the general populace. Butterfly emerged from its chrysalis, "born again" with its new body knitted from the spirit. So why did I still have the material injuries of my suicide?
"Suicide is a sin," rumbled one of the monsters dragging me, in a growl almost like a snarling dog’s. These creatures were not the ghoulish walking cadavers that are the academic class, but more like hairless baboons with their gray hides branded in spirals like a Maori’s tattoos, their heavy bony faces long and canine, with tusks like a warthog. They were muscular, naked, with fat stubby dicks, but crouched as they were only came to my shoulder in height. Low ranking demons, for menial tasks…simian-like, primitive, at the lower rungs of demonic evolution. Even their bat-like wings, which you would think would make them look regal, were raggedy, scarred, torn with holes in addition to being scarified with more spirals. The spiral is a symbol for eternity.
They reminded me of the flying monkeys in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
, but I wasn’t about to tell them that. They beat me enough as it was, for weakly struggling against them as they dragged me along dark, twisty corridors of black metal, lit with hanging bare bulbs. At one point I received a kick that audibly cracked a rib. At least I could cry, finally, blubber pleas and curses. It was, I soon realized, because my lower jaw was growing back.
Now personally, if I were running Hell, I might consider leaving everyone exactly the way they arrive. Someone who’d perished through cancer or AIDS would remain skeletal, weak, wasted away for all time. A suicide like me would be forced to go about with his skull shattered, horrific in aspect, shunned by the rest of the Damned, always in excruciating pain. But there is more sadism to be had through contrast. The fulfillment of Christmas morning, after all, is nothing without the anticipation of the night before. Waiting to be wounded again…knowing it is inevitable that your healed flesh will be ravaged…beats down the spirit even more, I think. The periods between the suffering, which only seem like breaks, make the periods of suffering more horrible by contrast. Yin feeds yang. Hot is hotter for knowing cold. If I had never healed from my suicide, I might have been able to lose myself forever in the madness of blind pain. But being able to recover, to come back to myself, makes the fear of losing myself again all the more frightening.
I was brought into a very large room and I mean
very
large, like Penn Station. There was even a vast window for a ceiling, though many of the panes set in its metal latticework were broken, and hence, here and there on the floor were pools of rained blood. A long queue of naked people, three abreast, was lined up with patrolling Demons half-sauntering, half-skipping like chimps along either side, poking people with spear-like iron pikes if they thought they were screaming too loudly, or about to crumple hopelessly to the ground, or might try to flee out of sheer panic. My escorts hoisted me to my feet and shoved me toward the end of the line. Miraculously, I was able to stay on my feet, my pain having greatly subsided. Though I was caked thickly in my own gore, I tentatively reached up to find that my face was intact and the top of my skull almost entirely fused whole.