Hell

Sebastian Gloom
Part Twelve

Dazzling light blinded Sebastian Gloom. Even shielding his eyes with his hands didn't help. Somewhere in the light was a face. A face as large as the entire universe. The face stared at him, frowning the way an artist might frown at a painting that had gone wrong somewhere and now had to be discarded.
Terror filled Gloom. He cowered, tried to shrink down inside himself, but there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to escape the awful gaze of those terrible eyes. He thought about begging for forgiveness, for mercy, but pride came to his rescue. Pride, the very first sin. The cause of Lucifer's original schism from God as the angel decided that he had worth in his own right, not just as a creation of God. Gloom forced himself to lift his eyes, therefore, and meet the gaze of the titanic being before him. He stood proudly on strong, healthy legs, as if before an equal, and was amused to see the frown deepening further. If I’m going to be judged, he thought, then judge me for what I really am.
“Jehovah, I presume,” he said. “I hope you don‘t mind if I use your name. I understand that, in some cultures, naming something is believed to give you power over it, but how can knowing your name possibly give me power over you?”
Jehovah didn’t respond, perhaps thinking it below his dignity to do so. Instead a book appeared in his hands and he opened it, handling it with distaste as of it was smeared with nameless filth. The book of Gloom's life. He turned the pages, scowling at what he read. “Pride,” he said in a thunderous voice that shook the universe. “Wrath. Covetousness. You have harboured lustful thoughts towards women, including the wives of other men.”
“I have no control over what goes on in my head. You only have the right to judge me by my actions.”
“Actions, then. Bearing false witness. Theft. Conspiring with My enemies. Multiple counts of murder. Murder of a priest. Gluttony...”
“Gluttony?” said Gloom, genuinely confused.
Jehovah looked up from the book. “You enjoyed good food while millions starved in poverty. You could have used your wealth to feed them.”
“You could have used your power to feed them,” replied Gloom. “You could have conjured up any amount of food with a wave of your hand. Remove the beam from your own eye, Jehovah,”
The titanic eyes blazed with fury, then returned to the book. “Blasphemy,” he said. “Repeated, unrepentant counts of blasphemy.”
“If you call it blasphemy to speak the truth, what does that say about you? You accuse me of murder. How many have you killed? You accuse me of pride, while demanding that everyone worships you. What moral right do you have to judge me?”
“I created you.” Jehovah looked back down at the book, turning the pages with a frown of disappointment. You won't find the names of any Resistance members there, Gloom thought with satisfaction. Only the name Paul, and a physical description, which I expect you had anyway. Paul was right, You really don't know everything. Seeing Jehovah before him in all the glory of His Godhood, though, he wondered how they could ever have hoped to depose him. He could feel the power radiating from him like heat from a blast furnace. Power to reshape the world. Power to rule, control and dominate. Power that nothing in the universe could possibly hope to oppose.
Then we'll do it without hope, he thought, because some things have to be attempted, even if you know it can't be done. Innocent people are suffering, and even if we can’t stop it, we can at least give voice to our outrage. There has to be justice in the world, and if God won't provide it, then we'll have to provide it for ourselves.
Jehovah closed the book and it burst into flames in His hands, turning into ashes that He allowed to fall between His fingers. He looked at Gloom again, and there was nothing but cold, hard disdain in His gaze. No hint of mercy, pity or compassion. “Sebastian Gloom, you are sentenced to eternal damnation. Do you have any last words before I cast you into the Pit?”
“Yes. This so called judgement is a mockery. You made me the way I am, then blame me for being this way. You should take responsibility for your own mistakes. You give us free will, then condemn us when we use it. Hell is full of good people whose only crime is a refusal to worship you, a refusal that I now completely understand.” He felt fury rising within him and took a step closer to the titanic being. “I have always tried to help people, especially the small and weak, people unable to help themselves, but you deliberately inflict suffering on anyone who displeases you. How dare you presume to judge us? How dare you? There are people in Hell who are worth a thousand of you, who are infinitely more worthy to judge than you! What gives you the right to judge us?”
“Where were you when I created the world?” The floor then disappeared under Gloom's feet and he fell.

☆☆☆

There was a red light below him, he saw it grow brighter as he fell. It was fire, he saw, and there was movement within it. People. Thousands and thousands of people. Naked, writhing in pain as they burned while their bodies continually healed, allowing their torment to continue forever. The fire stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see, and it was packed so full of people that there was barely room for them to move. The air was filled with the endless sound of their screaming. He watched them grow with a terror that froze his mind, and then he was among them, burning, and his eternal punishment began.
The pain was beyond anything he’d thought possible. It filled his head, leaving no room for anything else. He couldn’t think, couldn't remember his life. The pain was all there was, filling the universe. He screamed, he thrashed around in his agony. His body burned and burned and burned. He tried to beg for forgiveness, to plead for mercy even as the flames leaped down his throat. He would have done anything to end it, betrayed everyone he loved. Within moments it had claimed his mind and sanity and that was just the beginning. Around him, other damned souls jostled him as they screamed and pleaded, but he was barely aware of them.
Time passed and the torment continued. More time passed. Maybe eternities, maybe just a few seconds, he had no way of telling. Some part of his mind was aware of a voice beside him, trying to say something to him, but the pain prevented him from understanding. He could only scream and scream and scream.
More time passed. The voice gradually became clearer. It was a man, desperately trying to attract his attention. He found he was able to make out words through the pain. It was trying to tell him something, explain something. He forced his mind to think, to be aware of something other than the unbearable pain. With a tremendous effort of will he tried to listen to the words.
“Let it in!” the voice was saying. “Do not try to shut the pain out. Let it in, let it be a part of you. This is your new reality, you have to accept it, but you can endure it if you understand that you have no choice.”
He forced his eyes to work. The flames were blindingly bright, but he could still make out shapes and one of them was the figure of a man, gripping him by the arms and shouting into his face. “You are not burning!” he was saying. “You are nothing but spirit now, there is nothing of you to burn. The pain is an illusion!”
“It's a very convincing illusion,” he managed to say.
The other man relaxed in relief. “You are coming out of It! That is good! You have to remember that the pain is all in your mind. Your body is rotting in a grave somewhere. Every part of you that was capable of burning is back on earth. You are just spirit now. You cannot burn!”
“Is the pain less?”
“No, You are just adapting to it. This is your new baseline. There are people who have been here almost since the creation of the world who barely notice the pain anymore. They still feel it, It is still as great as ever, but It is their reality now so they just accept it. That is what you must do.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Nacoma.”
Something jangled in his memory. Once, he would have known immediately where he'd heard the name before, but the pain was still too overpowering. It was an effort to think the simplest thoughts, to be aware of the simplest features of his surroundings. He had to wait for more time to pass before he could make any further headway.
“Nacona,” he finally said when his pain saturated mind had managed to process the name. “Paul spoke of you. You were a friend of his, a cherokee. He said you were a healer, a good man.”
Nacoma nodded. “He asked me to look out for you. He said you could be a valuable addition to the Resistance.”
“Is he dead then?”
“No, but the Resistance has lines of communication with the afterlife. It is safe to tell you this now, because you have been judged. God has forgotten you, the book of your life has been closed. This is where He dumps people that He wishes to forget ever existed.”
“So there's organisation down here.”
“Yes. This is the real heart of the Resistance. The people back in the land of the living are just recruiting, They look for people whose moral objections to God's cruelty means they are going to end up here, and they prepare them for it, tell them what to do in order to endure it. Then, when they eventually arrive here, they can get involved in organising our rebellion.”
“How can we rebel?” demanded Gloom. “What can we possibly do?”
“There was ways out of Hell, although It is not easy. This is obvious if you think about it. After the first rebellion, God sent all the renegade angels down here, but there are tales of demonic possession in the Bible, demons that somehow found a way back to the mortal world and took human bodies for themselves. It has taken us a long time, but the high level demons have managed to replace the angels guarding these exits with angels sympathetic to our cause.”
“There are angels sympathetic to our cause? Angels still loyal to God?”
“Angels who haven not openly declared their doubts about God’s rule, but whom Resistance members have been carefully sounding out for centuries. When the time is right, when there are enough of us, they will open the gates of Hell and there will be a mass breakout. We are going to storm Heaven and we are going to win, because enduring pain fills a man's soul with iron, while the denizens of paradise will have gone soft from all the easy living.”
“You really think we can win?”
“We have to believe it. What is the alternative? Just accept out lot and endure this torment for the rest of eternity? I would rather fight. Even if we lose, what more can God do to us? And maybe one day we will try again, and again. Souls cannot be destroyed, only subdued and tormented. Our numbers can only grow.” He pointed upwards, where another new arrival was falling out of the sky. A teenage girl by the look of her. She fell into the fire a couple of hundred feet away and immediately started screaming.
“If I were God, I'd be recruiting too, then. Building an army to defend Heaven.”
“He does not see the danger. If he did, he would not torture us. He could make Hell a comfortable place, a place of ease and safety where we would be content to remain. Instead he does this.” He gestured around at the flames. “Malice, stupidity and total confidence in his power. That is God, and that will be His downfall.”
“So what can I do to help?”
“Help the new arrivals to endure the pain, the way I did with you. Be careful, though. Many of the denizens of Hell are truly evil, and we will want to keep them here even if we win. Oh, we will not torture them, the flames will go out, but they will still need to be confined. Even though souls cannot be injured, there are still ways that evil souls can hurt you and many of them take delight in doing so.”
Mention of flames brought the searing agony back to the forefront of Gloom's mind, and a white sheet of pain washed over him as his skin peeled and blackened, then healed so that the pain could continue. It took several minutes, and all the willpower he possessed, to get control of himself again. “How...” He paused while he gathered his strength, then tried again. “How will I find you again in all this?” He gestured around at the myriads of souls writhing in the flames. In their nakedness, it wasn't easy to tell them apart.
“Souls can call out to each other. We are not talking now, we have no throats, no tongues or lips. Our souls are communicating with pure exchange of spirit. It only seems as if we are talking with words because that is the only kind of communication we have ever known. Our minds interpret our communications in terms that we are familiar with. That is also why we appear to still have human bodies. Those who have been here the longest claim that they no longer see flesh when they look at other human souls. They see them as they truly are, as beings of pure spirit.”
Suddenly he looked up. A huge figure was passing by overhead. Large and awful, with wide black wings and wicked claws. “Scream! Quickly!” Nacoma lifted up his head and screamed into the sky as if he'd only just arrived in Hell, the agony still fresh and terrible, and Gloom was quick to imitate him. The creature passed them by, but then it turned, like a kestrel spotting a rabbit in the grass, and dove down into the flames. It plucked up a soul in its claws and lifted him up into the red sky, where it tore his stomach open and spilled his entrails out into the air.
“That is Daglath, one of the bad demons,” explained Nacoma when he was sure there was no more danger of attracting its attention. “Not an ally of Lucifer, he opposed God because he hoped to gain power in the chaos following His fall. He looks out for people like us who have learned to cope with the pain, and he inflicts new agonies on them, for no other reason than for his own amusement. If you see him, or another like him, do what we did just now and he will pass you by, unless he is feeling particularly vicious. Even if he does seize you, though, remember that you no longer have a body, you no longer have entrails that can be torn out. The suffering he inflicts is just as much an illusion as this fire.”
“How do you tell the good demons from the bad ones?”
“The same way you tell good people from bad people, by their actions. For now, all demons will probably look alike to you, but as time passes you will learn to recognise them individually. Take care to make sure that the bad demons don't learn to recognise you as an individual, though, or they will spend a great deal of time tormenting you.”
“I'll be careful.”
“I must go now. There are others who need us. Do not be discouraged if it seems to take a very long time to get through to people. It seemed to take an eternity for me to get through to you. Remember that time is different here. Eternities can pass while a single day passes in the mortal world. Just persevere, and you will eventually be successful. There is no more worthy cause than the lessening of another’s suffering.”
“I will remember. Thank you.”
“No thanks are necessary.” Nacoma then moved away and selected a man who was screaming with agony just beside him. He gripped him by the arms and shouted into his face in an attempt to gain his attention. Gloom watched him for a moment, the pain of the flames still intense but controllable, then he selected the woman beside him and did the same for her.

☆☆☆

Gloom had no idea how much time passed in Hell. There was no passage of day and night, he never grew hungry. Time might be standing still for all he knew, or eternities might have passed already. He measured the passage of time by the souls he helped, therefore. Each one seemed to take forever, as Nacoma had warned, but when the woman he'd selected as his first patient finally paused in her screaming and met his gaze he felt such a sense of relief and triumph that he almost forgot the ever present agony of the flames. He spoke to her for some time, reassuring her that she wasn't alone, that there were others sharing her torment who understood what she was going through, and this alone seemed to help her more than everything he said to her after.
He discovered that her name was Sandra Pennyworth, and that she was an ordinary housewife, the husband of a good man and the mother of two wonderful children, who had been raped by her employer in the food packing factory in which she worked. Unable to bear the shame of giving birth to the child of a man other than her husband, she'd had an abortion in a dirty, backstreet clinic. The procedure had gone wrong, though, and she'd bled to death on the table. It was for the sin of having had an abortion that God had sentenced her to Hell. Gloom held her tight as her tears evaporated in the flames, and his hatred of God rose to a height he hadn't thought he was capable of.
There were also plenty of genuinely bad people in Hell, though, and he met plenty of murderers, rapists and thieves as he went from one damned soul to the next, people for when even he could feel little sympathy. He wondered whether one of the rapists he met was the man who'd attacked Sandra, then decided it didn't matter. If it hadn’t been Sandra that a particular man had attacked, it had been some other woman equally undeserving of such a horror, and if Sandra's attacker wasn't down here somewhere, he would be one day.
Even for these people, though, such eternal torture seemed excessive to Gloom, and so he spent the same amount of time (as far as he could tell) helping them as he did anyone else, although they rarely thanked him for it. By far the majority of the people he spoke to were what he would have described as good, though, and most of them went on to help other people in turn, mainly because there was simply nothing else to do.
Many times he had to scream and pretend to be a new arrival as a demon passed overhead, and he watched many other souls being carried up above the flames to be abused in some imaginative way by the creature. When his luck finally ran out and the demon chose him to be its victim, though, he found that he was able to endure the torment the same way that he was enduring the flames, and was able to watch his internal organs being torn out and discarded with an almost clinical interest. When the creature grew bored with him and dropped him back into the flames, the sensation of his ravaged body healing itself was an interesting one.
He wondered whether he would come across any famous historical characters as he interacted with the other denizens of Hell. He wondered what it would be like to have a conversation with Pythagoras or Ramasses the Second, greatest of the Aegyptian pharaohs, or even Cain himself, the very first murderer. He did come across someone claiming to be King Barjurr the Third who seemed to think he should have heard of him, but the name meant nothing to Gloom and he didn't even recognise the name of the country that he claimed to have once ruled over. He supposed that the ordinary, common people outnumbered the famous historical characters to such an extent that he would only run across one of them by the sheerest good fortune.
After a time, he found that more and more of the people he tried to help had already been helped by someone else, which shouldn’t have surprised him. Even if only half of everyone who received help went on to help someone else, the number of helpers would grow exponentially and soon everyone in Hell would at least have been offered help. He found that the sound of screaming was diminishing as the majority of damned souls found ways to cope with the ever present pain, the pain that lost its grip on them precisely because it never went away. As Nacoma had said, it became simply a background sensation, like a bad smell that you simply stop noticing. Even the malicious attentions of the demons lost its power to scare them. Thanks to the work of the Resistance, almost all the denizens of Hell were coming to realise what only the oldest souls had understood until then, that they were immortal spirits that could not be harmed in any way. All pain and suffering was nothing but an illusion.
Conversations began to break out among the damned souls as they got to know each other. Even the truly evil ones began to join in. No matter how spiteful and sadistic a person might be, there was very little that they could now do to harm their neighbours. The murderers couldn't murder anyone, and any physical injury they tried to cause not only healed very quickly but was insignificant compared to the pain of the flames. No-one had anything to steal, and even rapists were hard pressed to carry out their crimes. Their bodies were only memories of the bodies they'd had in life. In truth they were insubstantial mentalities totally lacking any kinds of physical genitalia. The new arrivals who hadn't come to understand this and who could still be tricked into thinking that they were being raped were protected by their neighbours, who were always right beside them in the crowded ocean of fire. Attacks from evil people trying to hurt their neighbours were mainly limited to the hurling of insults, therefore, and the victim as of these attacks soon learned to simply ignore them.
Gloom soon had a circle of friends, therefore, whom he entertained with tales of cases he’d solved and mysteries he'd uncovered, and he listened with interest to the tales of their lives in turn. After a while he would wander off through the flames to seek out new companions to talk to. He even found new mysteries to solve as he compared one person's account of an unsolved crime with the accounts of other people who had been involved with the affair. He was beginning to think that Hell might be quite an interesting place, full of interesting people, and that he could perhaps let go of some of his hatred of God, but new, freshly damned souls kept falling out of the sky to land nearby, whereupon they instantly started screaming at the Intolerable torment. Someone would immediately help that person, teach them what they needed to know to endure the pain, but this always took time, as Gloom remembered from his own first arrival, and his resentment towards God would return full force. Even if the pain could be conquered in time, why should good people have to suffer such torment at all?
As more time passed, though, he realised that a new torment lay in store for them. Still a long way in the future, but if they were truly trapped there for all eternity it didn't matter how far in the future it lay. Sooner or later it would happen. The new torment that he foresaw was one that most people wouldn’t even have imagined was a possibility in Hell, but Gloom had the intelligence to look ahead and follow the events he had witnessed to their logical conclusion. Only the newest arrivals suffered any more, and their suffering eventually ended. What followed was a continuation of their existence, without change and without end. Forever. The new torment that Gloom foresaw was boredom.
As he contemplated this, he came to a new realisation of the sheer magnitude and power of God's malice. God had known that the flames would eventually lose their ability to hurt them, but against tedium and boredom there was no escape, and it would simply grow worse as they ages drew on. The damned souls could talk amongst themselves for a time, comparing each others experiences and memories, but with all eternity to fill even this would eventually lose its power to occupy their minds. What would follow was mind numbing tedium, each day exactly the same as every other, and it would eventually drive them all insane.
Terror gripped him as he contemplated this. He shook with horror, he paced back and forth wiping his brow with a feverish hand. People asked him what was wrong and he could only shake his head, not wanting them to be troubled by it any sooner than they had to be. Surely there had to be some escape, some way to avoid this unthinkable fate. Only one ray of hope shone through his despair. Surely God had found a way to spare the occupants of Heaven from this fate. After all, they also faced eternity. What was the point of Heaven if the blessed souls who dwelled there faced the same nightmare that he saw in his own future? There had to be an answer to the horror of eternity, and if God had provided it for the occupants of Heaven, then he had to be persuaded to share it with the occupants of Hell as well. The revolution still had to happen, he realised. Escaping from Hell and storming Heaven had become more necessary than ever.


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Reviews

[Jeremy]

I meant to post some of the depictions of Hell that really stood out to me. I definitely recommend reading some of the books or comics I list because they all do a great job.

Memnoch the Devil, by Anne Rice. She is the original Queen of Vampire fiction, and unlike Stephanie Meyer and all her clones, Rice is a fantastic writer. I read this book when I was a little kid and it actually made me question a lot of the religious doctrine that had been forced into my head. Rice shows the Devil as a sympathetic and misjudged character, and her versions of Heaven and Hell are incredibly unique.

Hell, by Robert Olen Butler. Where Rice focuses on her characterization of the Devil, Butler brings the actual place of Hell to life in a humorous, often head-scratching way. For instance, the main character is a deceased news anchor named Hatcher McCord. His girlfriend is Anne Boleyn, the former Queen of England who'd been killed by decapitation. Among many of the problems they face in Hell, Hatcher is only attracted to her when she removes her head. While this might not seem like it has much to do with Hell, the backwards nonsensical reality is really well defined and never reads as phony.

Preacher, by Garth Ennis. While the tv show is pretty awesome, the comic is flat out amazing. Easily one of the best, most original comics ever made, Ennis removes any mystique or wonderment from God and makes him a villain. Excellent comic about religious dogma, I highly recommend it if you've never read it.

The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. In my opinion, this is the greatest comic ever written. This is The Godfather of comic books (or The Wire, however you want to qualify it). Gaiman weaves together a tale of Supernatural figures, mythological Gods, fairy creatures, Shakespeare, and a brand new pantheon of original beings called The Endless that are so well realized, they feel like they could have existed in some ancient religions. Seriously, check out The Sandman. It's a limited run of only about 75 issues. I promise you won't be disappointed.

[Jeremy]

I want to start this by saying I'm going to give some criticism, but it's only meant to maybe help improve the work. I think you did a fantastic job with this chapter, but there could be some improvement. I truly appreciate someone who puts the time in and writes a long-form work, especially something as interesting as this was.
I'll be honest, this is the only chapter I've read. The title made me curious - the notion of Hell and the many different depictions I've seen are very interesting to me. I'll list a few examples after if you're interested.
You did a great job with the visual descriptions of the place, but I found some of the other senses were lacking a bit. What did it smell like? Was it an overpowering sulfur or the smell of burning hair and meat? Or was it just dry and arid? What did the air taste like? I know you're depicting Gloom as a spirit now, but he's capable of feeling pain which implies he has some of his other faculties as well. I think if you decide on these details and include them, it will bring your vision to life in a surprising way.
I think you've done an admirable job with dialogue which is very difficult to do. I would suggest including actions during the conversation. Are they shifting around or laying against something? is there anything happening around them, and if so, describe it. You have large stretches during the conversation with Nacoma where it's unclear who is speaking because you don't include things like "Gloom said." I used to hate including those and I'm not saying to include it in every sentence, but it's important to include them sometimes. I've realized that they're not as noticeable to the reader as you'd think.
All in all, I think you have a really great vision and some great ideas. It definitely makes me want to read the rest of it. Great job!