There is a frightening, crystallized consistency in the details relayed by people resuscitated from death surrounding the psionic experience of Hell. It’s dark. There are no walls. No floors, no ceilings. Filled with the echoing baying of demons. Ripped at, clawed, torn, and pulled down to a bottomless interdimensional chasm.
The following is a transcription recorded by me from an anonymous source.
This person and I were both in the tumult of heroin addiction when this occurred. We typically used together, but this was one rare instance of so many hundreds of benders that I wasn’t at his side with a saving grace shot of Narcan. The following is an unembellished, if prosaic, recollection of what he saw inside the flatlined undercurrent of death. He was under for just over two minutes….
“Remember when the Red Dragon bags hit? Yeah. The bad batch Peter refused to sell because they were straight laced with Fentanyl? Got it from Brie. Shit was fire. Deadly, but fire. (We exchange superfluous memories of using irrelevant to the central story). I can’t say I woke up. I was already there when it appeared. It just was, if you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t. It’s hard to describe an awakening that is devoid of actually waking.
I was on a gurney inside of my hospital room in Intensive Care. Only all the medical equipment was gone. It was just a dim, gloomy room with four white walls, a grey floor, and structureless ceiling comprised of some smokey grey nimbus. There was some light, but the source didn’t exist. I wasn’t strapped down, but I couldn’t move. The quietude was reposeful and dreadful in equal measure. The gurney started to roll on its own, out the door and into the hallway. The hallway was pitch and there was a small scampering noise all around. Shit, I’d never been so fucking afraid.
It smelled like a hospital. The aroma of bleach and formaldehyde which was acrid and almost nauseating. I know too well the scent of the latter because I used to work for my uncle who was an undertaker. I’d seen lots of death in all sizes and shapes. At some point a figure appeared in front of me, nude and crystalline white, almost the lustrous consistency of Selenite quartz. Its skin glittered under the sourceless light. It was hairless and had deep, sunken cheeks.
The walls were some sort of grey colored material and the ceiling was missing. It was dark but cloudy. Tacked to the corridor walls were unlit candles inside of black, Gothic designed holders. Bizarre as this new reality was, it actually felt, as best as I can articulate, cathartic, like I’d reached the end to my means and was at a place of serenity. Then the robed figure and the wails materialized. Both the nacreous creature and the one in the religious habit were pulling me toward something. Then it started to rain.
As I was being pulled along there was a momentous break in the fold which absolutely dumbfounded me. I suddenly found myself sitting Indian style in black grass next to Bethany Sikes, a girl I was close with in my adolescence who died when we were in fourth grade. She fell out of a window, and her head was sundered down the center with blood that deluged from the tear coursing down her back ceaselessly. She was sobbing into her palms, and then she spoke.
‘I wish you weren’t here. You can’t be here. You dont know what this all is’. ‘What what is?’ ‘They won’t allow me to….’ ‘What?’ ‘Oh…I can hear it. Can you?’ ‘Where are we? Why are you here???? Shouldn’t you be in Heaven?’ ‘God. I wish you knew’, she said, seeming harried. Manipulated by an outside force. Then she told me she was afraid for me, followed by a bizarre inquiry - “is it purple, yet?’ It thundered, but the thunder was a a droning mutter. A deep, menacing laugh. Her face went dark and I was siphoned back to unreality.
A silent voice told me something I could only feel with my soul. It said that Bethany was an outgrowth of evil. That her harlot of a mother (even at that age whispers of her rampant infidelity reached our understanding, and poor Bethany…just, poor fuckin’ Bethany) had an abortion before she was born, and thus, in the eyes of faith, she herself was a helpless abomination. That she was good, but evil nonetheless. It was a warning. Definitely a warning, and all I could ask myself was ‘what the Hell is purple?’. I was back on the gurney, broken out into a cold sweat, and, as you know, on the eve of withdrawal.
I shouted that I was feeling sick. I screamed to be released. So that I could go searching for dope, even inside of this trembling vista of nothing. Trembling, because the floors started to quake. I begged as my muscles started to burn and ache. The thrumming of the floors made me nauseous. The robed figure moved to my side, and in my aide, produced a diabetic syringe with murky fluid. It, face sheathed by a black veil, pierced my arm, aspirated, and injected, patting my vein down and rubbing out the itch. I felt better, but also a lot more frightened.
Suddenly the chasm began to warm. Before that, there was no temperature. And the heat only accelerated. The metal bars around the gurney scalded my arms. My skin started to melt off and I screamed, but there was no sound, maybe because this place lacked a proper conduit for it. Or maybe not. Maybe torture was the point. My surroundings began to move like mirage distortion, the way the searing heat of a working grill makes the backdrop break into a languid snake dance.
A black, billowing river of smoke flooded into the corridor from ahead and all I could do was hack and choke myself senseless. My esophagus felt like a steel - bristled brush was scrubbing and grinding away the muscles until black blood spurted from my nostrils all up and down my hospital gown. My skin turned melted to superglue spooled around the metal like clay. The burning sensation was striking me down to the nerves. It was the most extreme pain I’d ever felt. Before I knew it everything turned black.
Claws extended from the walls and scraped away my skin. Ripped apart my gown. Anguished wails exponentiated and grew closer. All I could smell and taste was creosote and ash. Embers flickered like lightning bugs and stung like hornets when they alighted to my bare, raw skin. Is it purple yet? Is it PURPLE yet???? IS IT PURPLE YET YET YET YET YET????!!!!!!, echoed Bethany’s word like a struck, oscillating bell, tolling of some ambiguous certainty waiting to happen as I suffocated and burned.
A cold blast of fog vaporized most of the smoke to a narrow, floating rill seeping from the center of the Gothic, black double doors we’d finally reached. At this point I wanted to tear myself out of my own flesh and leave it smoldering on the floor. The doors spread opened in slow motion. Like a goliath crow placidly spreading its wings, ready to take flight. Something indecipherable was exchanged between my ‘assistants’ and another black, amorphous figure.
The white figure turned and looked in my direction. It was my dad, only his face was twisted into a terrifying rictus. His pale skin was almost green. Head like a skull draped in rubber. His grin so wide I thought it would connect at the back of his skull. His sockets were sunken and his pupils were stark black. He was laughing at me. Then he stopped, shook his head in disappointment, and turned back. He died of an overdose when I was just two. I think he was an embodiment of everything he didn’t want me to be. I might have vomited.
We passed though and entered a large chamber. It was my living room turned upside down. I looked up and saw myself hanging unrestrained from the ceiling, seated on my couch. Nodding off with a limp tourniquet coiling my arm like a dead viper and a syringe was pierced into the carpet. I had my fluorescent pink nite lite screwed into the lamp fixture and my beardie’s (bearded dragon) nightlight turned on, imbuing the entire apartment the shade of purple.
The room turned in a pinwheel revolution until all was upright. I looked into my own eyes, my doppelganger burning his into mine. He was terrified. His pupils constricted to pinpoints, and, without moving his lips, I said to myself, ‘this shit has to stop’. I stepped off of the gurney and fell to the floor. My skin still stuck to the metal, it ripped away in uneven patches; an unintentional flaying. ‘You need to leave! Get the fuck out of my house!!!!”.
My arms looked like a sweater that had just scaled a bulwark of razor wire and barbed fence. Patches of muscle were exposed, others down to the bone. Blood ran and never stopped. All i could taste was rust and bile. And yet, despite the agony, all I could do was rub my injection site. I remember wanting to jump into my own body and escape this nightmare, but a faction of shadowed, clawed figures prodded and skewered me with spiked ingots, thrusting me into to the door, screeching at me - ‘In! You’re rotten! Get inside! ROTTEN!’, they said repetitiously, until I turned the handle and exited.
Except I wasn’t exiting anything. I was pushed into, as best as I can describe, a tiny church confessional. They struck me until I fell backwards, landing over a floor and kneeler brandished with hot metal spikes. They cackled and shut the door. I never saw their faces. On the door was a little rectangular slat window. To the side the latticed opening where the priest sits, except in his place was a burning, vantablack fire. You couldnt see it, just feel the waves of suffocating heat rush in like a boiling tide.
I heard the window slat clatter and slide opened, and a purple light surfaced the way theater lights do during the credits at the end of a movie, and all I saw were these blades jutting out of the floor, walls, and ceiling. I couldn’t sit. Couldn’t lay (no room). Couldn’t stand, and yet, I had to do just that. I wasn’t of spirit form. I was whole, solid, and lucid. Except I couldn’t die.
The space was so crammed I could hardly stand. If I stood, they’d impale my feet. If I tried to sit, they’d pierce my legs and guts. And it started to heat. I began to bake inside of a serrated oven, and by then I don’t know if the fire or the spikes hurt worse. It was all just a sadistic amalgam of eternal anguish and hopeless despair. And as the eyes twinkled through the window, guffaws of sweeping, shrill laughter permeated my every existing cell. Every atom and tangible molecule. And I knew that in this place I’d be forever, beyond the (purple) curtain call of time.
Suddenly the torture chamber started to spin with afterimages of the terror I was stricken to when my eyes finally fluttered themselves opened, and I saw myself suspended cruciform underneath a group of doctors and nurses. One of those looming personnel looked me dead in the eyes, and very bluntly, said to me ‘you’re a lucky man. You need to stop this shit. Understand me??? And that was it. They said I was dead two minutes and seventeen seconds, but the horror I experienced slogged on much longer than that.
Perhaps the lingering pain I felt was a result of the surgery. When I overdosed I was standing up, and had fallen forward, face first into my glass refectory table centerpiece in my living room, which shattered under me and nearly caused me to bleed to death. I was lucky to have left my door unlocked. My elderly neighbor heard the crash and came in. She called 911. I know where she’s going when she dies. But me? Ha. I’ve relapsed since.”
I don’t know what’s come of this person as of today, but last I saw, he was the yellow hue of jaundice, thin as a bone, and shaking in his shoes. A few years back he was in the paper for robbing a Domino’s Pizza two days in a row. Such heedless behavior is sacrosanct for junkies. Perhaps everything he experienced was just an unconscious manifestation of junky guilt. God (and the Devil) knows I’ve had my share. But I believe in the power of darkness, and I’m sure it’s probably best to tread that path lightly.