I’ve never been what people consider to be religious. My folks never forced on me the monotony of church, temple, worship, or whatever the hell else you want to call the thing people do when they gather together and praise some god. I love it that way, too. Sundays are the best days for sleeping in.
Because of this, I could never find myself believing in any divine deity. The tenets of pastafarianism were my greatest pull to religion, simply due to how hilarious and absurd the ideals were. If I were to consider any religion, the satirical nature of pastafarianism would be the only one to satisfy my own cynicism related to every other religion. The Flying Spaghetti Monster above all others would be my savior!
Because of this, real religion was not something I ever found myself concerning. I regularly blaspheme, often saying things like “oh my god” and “jesus christ.” I also frequently say things like “I’ll see you in Hell!” to my friends and get replies like “I’ll have a seat saved for ya!” All of this on top of even more frequent swearing.
I don’t think I’m a bad person. I still like to believe I have the right morals, but I just couldn’t ever find myself ever believing in the big man in the sky who punishes any sin while also claiming to love me beyond my own imagining.
If you ask me, Mary was a common whore who claimed God got her pregnant to save herself from being stoned to death or whatever. Her son was just a narcissist, too absorbed in his own ‘holiness’ to see that his mother just did it with some rando, and he further claimed to be the son of God on top of this.
It’s all just so fucking stupid that anyone can really believe that bullshit they preach in church in this day and age.
I might believe it now though. You see, I’ve had my share of experiences in the past. I had my phases of experimentation while I was in college. I had done some acid in my day on top of the daily shot and bong rip. I also did some harder stuff at times (DMT, coke, shots of Everclear not just vodka), but those things were pretty much only done once or twice. I tried to avoid that harder, more dangerous stuff.
But those days are behind me, and I never shied away from talking about it. It’s part of my history, after all, and I’m not ashamed of my poor behavior. I fought to become better, getting myself a good job, a wife, a house of our own, I never lost my family through my antics so I was always close with them. It’s just my history, and I’ve accepted it as my own.
What I recently went through was very different from anything like that, though. You see, I was recently pronounced dead. Not very long ago, actually. As a matter of fact it was thirty seconds ago. I was in a car crash, having gotten T-boned by some drunk idiot who ran a red light from my left hitting my Civic’s driver side door at fifty miles an hour. I’ve been a drunk idiot before, but never one who was behind the wheel. Luckily I was smart enough to keep myself and my friends from doing that.
But I digress, because I suffered at that anyway. The hospital had done all they could, but recently I regained consciousness in a different way than waking up from a normal accident. I’d heard that before death you experience dream-like hallucinations similar to a DMT trip. Your brain produces it while dreaming, after all, albeit in miniscule doses, and this is said to be what the “my life flashed before my eyes” talk might all be about.
I preface with all this history about me because I know this was not a DMT trip induced by death. I had done that, and this was different. It felt even more real than the false reality created by DMT. This actually felt more real than real. I stood as a naked soul in the empty blankness of everything. I looked around and saw nothing for all eternity.
Very slowly, the void changed as color returned to my vision. This new existence faded into the world around me and I could begin making out shapes. It looked like a chair, actually there’s two of them. And a small table between them.
There’s two bookshelves on one side of this room with a gap between them, where I can now begin to distinguish its boundaries. The walls are forming, and I can also see a bartop across from the bookshelf.
Eventually the room has entirely faded into view, and I don’t need to squint to see any of the shapes. The bookshelves are painted a dark grey, with an innumerable amount of dark red leather bound books. They are all identical with no indication of what any of the books are named. Between them in the gap is a large porcelain bust raised to just about head height, of who it is I do not know.
The two lounge chairs in the middle of the room are matching all of the books, bound in the same maroon leather. They look pretty comfortable and sophisticated. The table between is glass, with two coasters on either side in front of the seats and an ashtray in the middle.
The bar is beautiful. Hundreds of bottles line the back wall with mirrors behind them. The seats are padded and high, again matching the dark grey and maroon color theme. Behind the bar also appears to be a humidor, with several boxes inside most likely containing cigars.
The wall dividing these sets of decoration was also large in size. Two tall windows with dark red drapes lay in the middle of the wall, which had some grey victorian-style wallpaper on it. The pattern repeated endlessly, swirling and moving into every direction, each section of the pattern joining back with duplicates of itself over and over again.
When I’m first able to see anything, I feel something is off. It immediately looks like somewhere I’d like to be, cozy and fancy. But something is wrong here. I can’t put my finger on it, but it feels eerie. Something is definitely weird.
While I’m in the middle of trying to figure this out, I hear a knocking behind me. I hadn’t turned to explore the rest of the room, but a door is there on the wall I hadn’t seen. It was the same as the other, but no windows and drapes, just a dark red door. I stand in confusion, but the knocking returns once more. I suddenly feel like I’m in The Raven, and that might be why I feel off. But I open the door, and to my surprise (which is counterintuitive, thanks Poe), I find someone at the door.
It is a fairly tall caucasian man wearing a matching dark grey suit and maroon tie. He looks very professional, and this room is most definitely his. He stands there with his hands behind him and his shoulders back, chest as high as one could possibly get it. Behind him is nothing.
The endless void of black I saw before coming into the room is the only thing that exists beyond the doorway. The man is standing in empty space like I was, and from the outside it looks funny because his feet are in the perfect position to prove he’s standing on some solid surface, but he clearly isn’t.
“May I join you?” he says very formally.
“Uh, sure,” I reply, not seeming like it’s my place to invite guests inside. Like I said, it’s obviously his room, so I’m not so sure why he’s asking to come in himself.
He walks in and meanders over to the bar, grabs a bottle of deep red wine and a glass hanging from the ceiling, and begins to pour himself a glass. “Like pinot noir?” he says to me.
“I do,” I reply, trying to exchange the same pleasantries with which he addressed me. “But I prefer scotch if you have any.”
“What’ll it be?” He seems to only speak in questions.
“You got Lagavulin?” I say. At most bars they laugh at you for questions like this, but this place seemed like the best chance of having the answer to that question be ‘yes.’
He reaches back, finds the sixteen year everyone loves so much, and begins to pour it into a little glencairn glass. He knows my style, and for the moment I’m here for it.
“Cigar?” he asks, further proving my conjecture.
“I love a Davidoff,” of which he manages to pull from the humidor, and hands me a cigar cutter and mini torch. He gestures to the seats for me to take one, so I wander back over and sit on the side closest to the bar, facing the bookshelves and the bust. Now I see it is of the man who just walked in. I wondered about his narcissism, but then I thought about my own drink and cigar order, and humbled myself.
He takes the seat opposite me with his wine and lights a cigarette of his own. If I’d known this man at all, I’d call this a perfect Saturday night with one of the boys. Instead it felt wrong, intrusive, and maybe even dangerous. What did I do to deserve this sense of luxury? It seems unwarranted and unearned, maybe a false sense of security.
“My name is Lucifer,” he says very coolly, like anybody could be named that. It stung a bit to hear, but I had been asking myself since I arrived ‘what the hell is this place?’ I remember dying, that much is true. Was it heaven, hell, or something in between? I had been pondering things like this since I arrived, and it seemed like a very real possibility that this was the Devil. He matched the place, but without that context he’d definitely look sinister in that suit.
“Joshua,” I reply, trying to sound cool and not at all frightened.
He laughs at this. “I know who you are, dummy,” he says, very friendly. My instincts are pulling me in both directions. Is he a friend, or is he actually Satan? “But do you know who you are?” he asks this with his head down and his voice a bit deeper. He raises his eyes back to me looking for a response.
I hold firm, but confused. I just told him who I was. At this he bellowed, a great hearty laugh as he leaned back and grabbed his abdomen. “Your face!” he said through his laughter. At this point I’m just lost.
“What is this place?” I ask when he regains enough composure to be able to hear me.
“Oh this little spot?” he asks with some playfulness. “It’s just a place to flop. You like it?”
“I actually love it here,” I say, finding some sense of casual banter. “I would kill for a place like this in my house.”
“Careful with those words,” he says, wiggling his finger at me. “I could give you this for that, you know.” When he says this I realize the error in my choice of words. People make deals with the devil, and I’d hate to accidentally do something stupid like that again.
“What are we doing here?” I ask him.
“I just want to talk to you,” he said, again very coolly and friendly. “I’m in a bit of a good mood today and I want to offer you something.”
Well this can’t be good. I immediately don’t want to make any deals here, but he intrigues me with his next sentence, probably why so many people are easily seduced by him.
“I want to give you a chance to earn back your life. For this is purgatory, and while you have been given to me, I have not taken you to the place you call Hell just yet.”
“What’s the catch?” I ask him, knowing there must be one.
“Ain’t no catch,” he says. “Just a condition that must be met. If you fail to meet it, you will come with me to the depths of all that is unholy, as originally intended.”
“And if I meet these conditions?” I find myself remaining impressively calm throughout this discussion. He scares me, as he should, but so far he’s done naught to hurt me, and I can’t help but feel his sincerity.
“You might have felt like you’ve been here for quite a while,” he begins to say, “but at the moment you are still in a hospital bed trying to be saved. Barely an instant has gone by on that side since you’ve passed over to this one. If you meet my condition, I will send you back to that other side. There the doctors can claim they ‘saved you’ or ‘brought you back to life’ or whatever they will want to say to boost their own ego.”
He says this last bit with some sarcasm, and it actually makes me smirk. “Ok, but what is the condition I need to meet?”
“Bring me… a shrubbery!”
Okay I admit I almost had Lagavulin come out my nose. He said this like the Knights of Ni from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I burst out laughing, as did he.
“This is a lie, of course. That is not the condition that must be met.”
Once I regain my breath, I ask, “Then what is the condition?”
“Write me a riddle that I cannot answer.”
I sit here and look at him for a moment. This time his face is serious. I am flooded with questions when I see that this is the actual task. “How long do I have?”
“As much time as you want. I’ll send you back to the hospital as soon as you have one. Remember, time is not a factor in this room.”
“How many chances do I have?”
“I’ll give you three, asking you to make each question an official guess before you ask me, in the chance you need to think aloud when I’m about.”
“Are there any things I cannot ask?”
“Anything is possible. All questions are riddles; whether I can answer them or not is all that matters.”
“How much do you know?” I wondered if he’d understand what I meant by this, but he answered in the way I needed him to.
“I am just as all-knowing as the one you call ‘God,’ and almost as powerful.”
“Almost?”
This he did not answer, only gave me a look. “You will remain in this room for as long as you need. The bottles will never empty, the books will always show what you think to read, the cigars will never reach your fingers, and the padding will never tear. You have an eternity to complete this task.”
“And what if I choose not to play? Take an infinite amount of time here and just enjoy the luxury you’ve given me?” I asked this looking for a loophole. This place is right up my alley, and I wouldn’t mind spending eternity here if I can just drink and smoke and read.
“Then that would be just as you said: not playing the game. Only if you really try will I let you keep this room to yourself. If you stop playing, and I’ll know if you do or not, you’ll come with me down, down, downward until there is nowhere else to go!”
I stare at him. My choice is Hell, or play this little game that also seems to have no road to victory. I sat in silence, and Lucifer took this as his dismissal.
He puts down his glass on the table, and he begins to stand up. He heads to the door and I can do nothing but sit here and stare at him. “I really do want you to win,” he says, pausing in the open doorway. “Like I said, I’m in a good mood.” And with this he shut the door and left me by myself.
If he wanted me to keep living, why give me such an impossible task? What am I supposed to say to stump someone who is all-knowing? My mind is flooded once more with questions of ‘what could I possibly do’ and ‘how could I get out of here.’
Where am I supposed to begin?
Once I was alone in the room I was just kind of stuck in place. I stared at the door for what felt like at least a few minutes, and I could not find myself moving around much apart from breathing. I did not know where to start with these riddles. I had not the slightest idea of how to approach this.
Where I did know to start was the bottle of Lagavulin left on the bar. I set out to see if it was true that these bottles never emptied. I brought it back to the comfy maroon leather chair and refilled my glass. It seemed true that the bottle was stuck at three-quarters full. Who had emptied it this far I wondered only for a moment.
I also kept puffing on my cigar, and it never burned away. I went and pulled one of the many identical books from the shelf and thought of the first book I could before opening it. Sure enough, it read “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984 by George Orwell.
I closed it quickly and put it back on the shelf. I thought of another book and went to grab a random one from the other side. When I opened it, it read “Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.” Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
This place was weird.
I figured while I was here in these luxuries I would divulge some sweet private time. I downed my glass and refilled it once more. I was gonna get comfortably drunk, sit here with my cigar, and read something to entertain myself. If I was gonna be here for an eternity, I could start by enjoying myself.
Another book, of which I opened to “Once upon a midnight dreary,” was the best thing to be reading in this place. My thoughts from before made this especially terrifying, and my mind was haunted. I finished my glass once more to rid myself of these unnecessary fears. Now perfectly buzzed and my mind feeling more open and free, I sat down to think of all I knew about riddles.
Turns out I don’t know squat.
The best I had was Riddles in the Dark, one of the most important chapters of all Tolkien’s work. I grabbed a book and opened it. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Probably my favorite opening to any story, but then again, I was a massive fan. I fanned through until I got to chapter five. I read it through once, then again, and another time. It is such a fun, but very tense, story all on its own.
I found a pen near the bookshelves and opened a random book once more. I had not been thinking of a title to give this book, and it opened blankly. I wrote down every riddle on the paper and its answer. I looked at them hard, trying to dissect them.
Each riddle had not only an answer, but the answers were things people knew about. Most answers were very literal, like eggs or wind or time. These types of riddles would not at all leave the Devil himself clueless. The best chance I had was to come up with a riddle similar to the one that ended the game between Bilbo and Gollum.
“What have I got in my pocket?”
This is debated within the story itself as being an unfair riddle. While it could be true, and certainly argued either way, it was the best chance I’d have to beat this game. I’d need an unfair advantage.
I thought in silence for a very long time. I recounted in my head all I could from my experience with him in the room. I thought aloud each sentence he spoke that I could remember, and one stood out to me above all the others:
“Anything is possible. All questions are riddles; whether I can answer them or not is all that matters.”
Anything is possible.
Quickly into my head it jumped, a question I thought I could ask him. I looked around, and I realized I had no idea how to get his attention. I looked around the room, trying to see if he was hiding somewhere in here but he wasn’t. So I went and grabbed the doorknob, which I could not turn. I banged on it a couple of times and I heard him knock back at me.
It scared me, and I instinctively backed away. As I did he opened the door and reentered from the blackness. “Have you got something already? It’s not been very long.”
“You said time doesn’t pass in here anyway.” I retorted with confidence.
“Quite right,” he said, looking far and away with some thought. “What do you have?” he said, returning his gaze back to me, and walking over to his chair where his wine still was.
“An official attempt.”
“Ooooh goody!” he said while clapping and rubbing his hands together. What the hell’s wrong with this dude? I can’t figure out if he’s evil or just like any other guy. “Off you go, then!”
I swallowed, and prepared my first riddle. “If anything is possible, is it possible for something to be impossible?”
“Oh, I like that one,” he said with absolute sincerity. I wondered if I’d had him. “Paradoxes are marvelous human inventions in an attempt to explain what they cannot understand. Their puny limits keep them locked up, and their perspective fails.”
I stood here a moment. That wasn’t an answer, so I was lost. He saw my confusion and returned to me. “Impossibility being a possibility is, in and of itself, a possibility. That means it is no guarantee that it is impossible, and therefore, is possible. The answer is no; impossibility is not a possibility.”
My brain hurts. Also, ‘possible’ is no longer sounding like a real word.
“I’ll give you a hint, though, because I like that question a lot.” I remained quiet and waited for Lucifer to continue. “Even if the answer was yes, it would have been answerable. My condition is for you to write a riddle I cannot answer. Keep that in mind.”
He began to get back up and make his way to the door. “You have two more tries. Make them worth it.” He shut the door behind him.
As soon as the door shut, I quickly turned back and got myself the paper and pen to write down exactly what he just said. Every word from his mouth could be used against him, especially the hint he gave me. I sat back down and stared at what I just wrote, thinking about it all while it was still clear and recent in my head.
I sat back and continued thinking. Paradoxes and contradictions might be unanswerable to humans, but he clearly had some kind of workaround. He even put it in terms that I could almost understand, and I tried to work it out in my head, to no avail.
I had to start new. The best thing I had was to still make something unfair. If I had an unfair question, I’d get him.
Because I had to start fresh, and because I felt like I couldn’t utilize the magic books properly, I spent tons of time in here just being bored and thinking to myself. Drinking, smoking, and reading about things that had nothing to do with riddles or philosophy was fun, but unproductive. I knew nothing about these things, much less book titles to help me learn about them or how to make them.
At one point I had removed all the bottles from the barback and looked at myself in the mirror. I just stared, out of boredom and drunkenness. I hoped I’d find some inner monologue to help me. It was here I thought I’d have another advantage if there was weed in this room.
The super creative, but ultimately stupid, questions people ask while they’re high can sometimes actually be super insightful. I wondered if it would help me at all, but there was none in here. I’d have to stick with the booze.
As I sat here staring, drunk and a bit wobbly, I was finally struck by another question. In my drunken haste, I banged on the door again asking for Lucifer to come back. I might have even called for ‘Lucy’ at one point, but I was in a daze and couldn’t confirm that.
He came back in and sat down quietly. “Been partaking enough?” he asked.
“I bet I’d drink you under this table,” I said with a hiccup.
Lucifer chuckled. “I bet you could,” he said, entertaining me with this, and probably himself. “Do you have an official guess?”
“Yesh I’d like to ask you now,” I slurred.
“Intrigue me.”
“What color,” I said, pointing at him with a flimsy arm, “is a mirror?” I smiled at myself. “Huh? That’s a good one too!”
The Devil looked disappointed, and he shook his head quietly. “No, Joshua, why did you ask me that?” I was confused, not because I was drunk, but about why he was answering that way. “You understand there’s two answers to that, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Philosophically, the mirror is whatever color you see. If you see yourself, it is ‘you’ colored. If you see a blue wall, it’s blue. Now scientifically, if you put two mirrors parallel to each other and look inside, it tints itself green as light is absorbed, making it literally a bit green in hue.”
My drunk mind was trying to comprehend, but I had seen parallel mirrors and the green tint before, and I didn’t think of this until he mentioned it. “Oh, shit.”
“You still have one more attempt. Maybe lay off the alcohol a bit and rethink everything,” he said with some care, as he began to head back towards the door.
“Well what am I supposed to ask a guy, who says he knows everything, a question where he doesn’t know the answer?” I say quickly, and with some slurring throughout. My tongue is very loose from all the scotch.
“Is this official?” he says to me.
“…What?”
“Is that an official attempt? You asked me a question.”
The gears in my head start cranking. Rust popped off in all regions of my brain and it began to fire with quick and heavy thought. It felt like all the alcohol in my bloodstream vanished! I respoke the sentence in my head. Yes! Of course he wouldn’t know that answer! He himself cannot possibly know what he doesn’t know if he thinks he knows all!
But wait, is this another paradox? It sounds like it is, and I try my damndest to decipher this. I’m still wasted, after all. It sounds like it might be, but if he can’t answer, then I win. He could refute, but I thought of the right response for this if he did. It was my only shot, and I went for it.
“Yes, official guess. What can I ask you that you do not know the answer to?”
He smiled. “Certainly you don’t believe there is an answer to this question?”
“Then answer it!”
“There are many things you could ask me that I could not answer. That is my answer! Do you deserve to know them? You just lost the game, so I think not.”
“If I can hear one, I’ll know I’m wrong.” My confidence was high. He was avoiding an explicit example. Yes, I had him now. He looked at me, and I stared back.
His look changed in an instant. At first he looked at me as if he’d won the game, and felt sympathy for me for guessing so quickly. It looked like he felt bad, like he really didn’t want to take me to Hell, but had to anyway.
Then, it changed immediately into a face worthy of the name Lucifer. He turned bright red, and grew in stature, tearing his suit away from his body, screaming in hatred while he did so. His muscles grew and his legs turned into those of a goat. Horns jumped from his head and great wings sprouted on his back. Huge canine teeth came shooting out of his gums as his face took on something beastly and otherworldly. The room disappeared back into the void as he grew too large for it, and his energy diminished all that was around.
He roared as he spoke to me, his voice deep and demonic. “You have not gotten the final laugh, pitiful human! You were sent to me for a reason! You will be back, and then it will be for all eternity! You will suffer by my hands, your fate has been sealed by your own! Begone, foul pest, for I cannot bear to gaze upon your wretched form! When we meet again, I will rid you of it and give you pain and fire! This is not the end, and when we reach it then I will be laughing! Away with you!”
He swiped his humongous red hand at me, and it hit me square in the torso with his nails cutting into my flesh. I was sent flying through the dark, empty void at a speed incalculable. I traversed all of everything for a time I felt could not exist. Forever I flew through nothing until…
My eyes opened slowly. I had a bright light shining directly into my face. A tube was coming out of my mouth and I could feel it down my throat. My muscles could not move, and I was sore pretty much everywhere. I heard the faint voices of people around me, the only thing I could make out was “He’s back, quickly everyone back to work!” I must’ve been given more medicine even though I was alive again, because I promptly fell back asleep.
When I awoke properly, I was still in a hospital bed, but in my own private room. My arms were casted and elevated, and my body was wrapped in bandages. I couldn’t move a thing, especially not the left leg that I could not find attached to my hip. I was in bad shape, but I was alive, and I cried for a long while.
Eventually the doctors came in to inform me of the accident. I remembered quite a bit, as my body had taken much of the brunt of the collision versus my head. I blacked out when it happened, but I remember being in the hospital under emergency care before fading into death and reawakening in the void.
Not to my surprise, the doctors told me this experience was likely part of the hallucinations people have upon that stage of injury. I nodded my head and went along. It hurt to even nod my head. I lay here quietly by myself for a while before my wife came in crying her eyes out. Even she would fail to believe what I went through.
I don’t know about you, but those last few moments with Lucifer were horrifying. I could not express my fear, and I can only now recount what happened by just telling you what I saw. The feeling. That was petrifying. I cannot face him again. If I do, I will know what true suffering is like. He did keep his word, though. He did give me my life back. To this day, I am conflicted. If Lucifer was so evil in the end, why did he give me a gift? Why did he show me love before his evil?
He also told me that I was sent to him for a reason. That much must be true, but I could change that. I struggle to know if I can though. Because I was so frightened of the Devil, how could I possibly face God’s judgment? His wrath is beyond even Lucifer’s. What can I do to find God’s love? Will he show me his evil before his love, like Satan?
Do I even want to find God’s love if it is more terrifying than the Devil himself?