Hell is simply a collection of evil choices accumulated in a collapsed brain. A parallel universe perceived only with acts of extreme violence. The entanglement of the soul with deep dark desires, desires collected and energized in a specific realm of the universe.
I became entangled with Hell, not with a conscious choice to do evil, but as an unwilling effect of dereliction or concern for someone else’s life, or maybe both. I’m not for sure.
I was making my way home one night from Tony’s, a sports bar down the block, with a miserable headache and a sore throat. The Titans had blown a 21-0 lead, losing by a field goal in the waning seconds. I lost my temper, as I always do when watching the Titans. My friends have told me on many occasions that they are on the verge of leaving me out of any more outings, if I kept it up. They were sick of my temper.
I don’t live far from the bar, so I usually just walk home. That night I was almost to my street when someone approached me from behind. I didn’t want to seem like a wuss, so I didn’t turn around. I should have. The man shoved a needle in my neck. My body felt numb; I fell to the ground.
When I woke up, I was tied to a metal examination table. The room was dark. The table I was on was up against one wall. Leaning against the opposite wall was another table with a large box on it. I could only move my head, and when I surveyed the room there wasn’t much I could see. I could somewhat make out a door on the left of me, but I didn’t know if it was real or not, maybe a hallucination from whatever drug my mind was attempting to dislodge from its empty corridors. A door opened and a man walked in with a black hood on his head. All I could see was his eyes, and yet, they looked familiar. He flipped on a switch near the door. Light flooded my expanded pupils from a hanging light fixture directly above my head. I had not noticed it before, and so I was staring directly at the bulb. It was an unexpected flash of light, a rapid, savage abuse of my neurons. The man took off his hood and staring back at me was a paler, sicklier version of myself.
I was sick. I had come home from the bar feeling nauseous and weak. I had been hearing voices all week, telling me that I had only one option, one way to un-entangle myself from the horrible realm of gore and mayhem. The Titans had won that night and I was in an exceptional mood, until I started walking home. The visions began again. One moment I was walking down the sidewalk, the next I was walking through a deserted road, littered with dead bodies. The smell was awful. It affected my entire sinus cavity, nasal and throat. It was like wasabi mixed with rotting flesh. There were other humans, charred and burned to the flesh, feasting on the dead. They would look up and stare into my soul, but never attack. I felt safe and yet I knew I was in danger. I could sense that this state of affairs wouldn’t last. They were waiting on something, perhaps permission from a higher power. Some terrible entity was staying their hand. I so much wanted to be done with these nightmarish episodes, and then my unspoken prayer was answered. One of the demons spoke and gave me some direction.
“Abduct another. Kill him in front of the box.”
“What box?” I asked.
“It’s in your room.”
He reached out with his index finger and touched me on my forearm. His finger sunk into my skin, and I could feel an intense burning in my arm. It felt as if my skin was sloughing off of my body.
I woke up in my room. I didn’t know how I got there. I was sweating and feeling even sicker than before. My thoughts were chaotic. I heard a low shrill humming coming from the edge of my bed. When I looked up, I saw a simple metallic box sitting on my desk. I got out of bed and went to the box. It was vibrating and as I went to grab it a hand crashed through the box and grabbed my wrist.
The man that was me reached out to grab me, but I was able to free my right hand and grab him by the wrist. He tried to pull his hand away but I held firm, refusing to let go of my grip. The examination table was pulled up on two legs and tipped over to the floor. My restraints didn’t bust but I slid in between them and to the edge of the table as I fell to the floor, busting my shoulder.
I tried to jerk my wrist away, but the phantom hand only squeezed harder. The box fell to the floor. I lifted my arm up to try and understand what was happening. The box was opened but there was nothing in there but the arm extending out from it. I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. I started stabbing at the hand.
The feeble, sickly, version of my self pulled out a knife from his pocket and started stabbing me in the hand. My resolve to hold on was defeated, not because of my lack of willingness, but because the muscles in my hand were shredded beyond usefulness. I no longer had the muscles to operate a fully functional grip.
Once I had totally obliterated the hand, a thought came to my mind to start stabbing the box. I shoved the knife into the box. It didn’t feel like metal but gave way like flesh. Blood started to spill from the box.
He started to stab me in the neck. The pain was so intolerable. I was feeling weak and disoriented.
There was a reflection in a mirror on the other side of the room. I was sitting at a table. I had a knife in my right hand. My left hand was unrecognizable. Fingers were severed, muscles and bone exposed, flesh, blood, splayed across the table. My neck was bleeding and there were several deep gashes. I had been stabbing myself.
Sitting to my right, in my own kitchen, at my own table, was a burnt man, his only garment a vinyl coat melted to his skin, a singular covering to his grotesque, blistered skin. His scalp was scaled with dead skin and his hair was missing.
“You, you killed me.”
My thoughts raced. I was petrified. Who was this in my kitchen. A vision came to me, a vision I tried to ignore but it bore through my thoughts, against my will, and with a force I had not the power to push away. I had been at a bar, driving home, after a football game, with a blood alcohol level high enough to kill an elephant. I ran a red light and smashed into another car, pushing it into a utility pole. The engine ignited. A man was trapped in the car. I tried to back my car away to allow him a means of escape, but the engine was dead.
Fire started to consume the vehicle. I found a rock and smashed in the driver’s side window. He grabbed my wrist, and I felt the heat from his hand.
“Help me. Get me out of here.”
I instinctively pulled my hand away like a child touching a red-hot stove. The fire glinted off of a metallic box sitting in the back seat. It was a music box, one that he had bought for his daughter. I turned my glance back from the box to him. There was a shard of glass in his neck. He reached out to me again, but with his other hand. It was mangled and burned. The flesh was bubbling, falling off his bones. He grabbed the jagged glass still in place on the car door to try and pull himself through the opening in the window. His hand was like melted butter, and it slipped through the shards of glass pushing up bone and muscle.
I ran away, not wishing to see the man melt before my eyes. Already, the smell was rancid with burnt hair and skin. I heard the sirens. I looked back before I turned up my street. I could see a thick plume of dark black smoke rising in the sky. At that point, my soul became entangled with what I had done, a constant reminder set before my mind. I simultaneously exist in the hell I created and in the fantasy of a world where I had made a different choice. I was arrested, got out on bail, but I doubt I make it to trial. There is a part of me that wants to murder myself, another person, a version of me in another universe that hates who I am.