I'll See You in Hell Read online

  This wasn’t that same face. And this certainly wasn’t that same grin. No, this grin was dumb. And gap-toothed.

  Seamus!

  “Surprise, Kingston!”

  Reliving my childhood rape, with the role of Father McMurray being played this week by fucking Seamus, of all people?

  That was just not right.

  “Silly pretty boy. This is Hell. There’s no rules here. There are no bodies or walls or time or place. It’s all a state of mind that all boils down to one word: suffering. Let me show you.”

  He slapped me before he pulled out a hunting knife and started to cut off my clothes.

  You’ll excuse me if I choose to skip the gory details of my priestly defilement here in Hell. Let’s just say that, when it was all said and done, Seamus was much more adventurous, imaginative, and bloody than Father McMurray could ever have dreamed to be. It wasn’t just about sex and violence. It was about degradation & humiliation. In the real world, Father McMurray just wanted to soil my body. Here, Seamus wanted to spoil my soul. And despite all my seemingly fatal injuries and violations, it never seemed to end.

  More importantly, I realized through my agonizing torture that Seamus never seemed to end either. And no matter how much he upped the ante, he could never find release or satisfaction. He was, in fact, in pain. Agony.

  This was a punishment far worse than I could have imagined. The two of us forced to fuck each other to pieces for all eternity, no end in sight. And through my ruptured lip and shattered teeth, I giggled just a little. Come on, Seamus: is that all you’ve got?

  Seamus tried harder and harder, and only injured himself more in the process. Crying and bleeding from all the wrong places, Seamus was wretched. I could never have imagined that it was possible to extract so much pain from another soul so deeply through my own suffering.

  I think this is where Seamus miscalculated. He assumed that because I was refined, tailored, elegant, and professional, it somehow made me soft on the inside. He didn’t understand that my exterior restraint was there to hold back the monster inside. He wanted to spoil a soul for his master that was already black as coal.

  By then, I’d turned the tables. I gave as good as I got. I used my own flesh as a weapon against his. Matching him violation for violation. It was as if time had stopped.

  Hell was exquisite. Sublime. I taunted and tormented Seamus even more. I spat on him and smeared him with his own filth. I realized what a waste my life had been. I’d spent so much time keeping my emotions in check that I had made sure all of my hits were clean and antiseptic. I never imagined how much more I could have gotten out of my work if I had just let go and thrown caution to the wind, reveling in the pain of all of those people like I was devouring Seamus.

  Here. In Hell.

  I’d never been happier.

  Finally, Seamus cried out to the air around him, to anyone but me who might hear.

  “You promised me! You promised me satisfaction if I gave myself to you and brought you souls! You lying bastard!”

  It took me a moment to realize who he thought he was talking to.

  Then I could feel the temperature drop in the room. Inside this poor, decimated faux-rectory, smeared with blood and excrement and gore, everything turned bone-cold on a dime. Frost and icicles grew instantaneously from all the walls and windows. Frostbite dug into every single limb. Stabbing sharp pain. So cold it actually felt like it burned. Even as the lights grew dark around us, the ice all seemed to glow with a cold, low, blue flame. A fire that can never die.

  Seamus and I were no longer even recognizable as anything we could ever imagine as ourselves. Brittle, frozen, wretched blobs of lacerated flesh, struggling to scream with fractured jaws in pain & horror as the walls of the rectory split apart around us, leaving us lying on a craggy, ice-covered wasteland. A lake of cold fire, filled with the echoing moans of the miserable undead, all scattered about and sunken into the icy plane by the millions in all directions as far as the eye could see. Lumps of living, shrieking misery that dotted the landscape like the cultivated fields of a farmer of woes.

  And, then, in the crackle of lightning from the dark clouds gathered among the stalactites of ice that seemed miles above us, I saw it. At first, I thought it was some distant mountainous glacier in the distance. But then it moved. And the moans of the undead sufferants turned to wails of pure, unadulterated horror, knowing what would come next.

  The glacier unfurled, revealing that it was really coiled, snow-covered batwings that were miles across and towering over us like the Andes. Wrapped inside its own wings, the monster within had jet black skin, with millions upon millions of twitchy insect arms and wriggling tentacles covering its body like some awful pelt, topped by a black goat’s head the size of an aircraft carrier.

  Its eyes glowed red, like blazing search-lamps that skimmed the surface of the frozen boneyard, leaving tracks of smoldering putrid ice in the wake of their gaze, until they found the quivering lumps of frosted desecrated meat piles that were all that were left of me and Seamus. It snorted puffs of blue fire from its nostrils as the intensity of its gaze made running boils form on our skin. Seamus wailed as the few remaining teeth in his mouth melted from his wretched gums like white chocolate chips on a hot summer day.

  “I served you! I praised you! I sent you souls! So many souls!”

  The beast opened its mouth, and millions of the chewed-up damned spilled out between its teeth and drool like stale, uneaten breadcrumbs. Some screamed all the way down to the ice below, while others were snatched, mid-fall, by the beast’s appendages and hurled back into its waiting maw. It spoke, and its voice made the very ice beneath us quiver, like the sound of a million fingernails being drawn across an endless chalkboard.

  WHAT.

  SOULS.

  Seamus waved a bloody, dislocated, wart-covered stump that used to be his arm at me. “Kingston! What about Kingston?”

  The goat’s jaws pulled back and pouted a column of fire into the air as it laughed. Those who composed its meal were shot out into the air like screeching fireworks that rained down on the rest of us in a nightmarish hailstorm. The frost-entombed sufferants screamed and cried. But as for me, I was simply stunned at just how much the monstrous laugh sounded just like my own.

  HE.

  BELONGS.

  HERE.

  YOU.

  DID.

  NOTHING.

  The warts and boils were exploding all over us. The demonic gaze was unbearable. Seamus rolled over and squealed in anguish, “You lied to me!!!”

  I.

  AM.

  SATAN.

  I.

  LIE.

  Seamus, you poor, dumb bastard. I laughed. I never knew anything could be nearly as funny as what I’d witnessed and experienced that day. Just for more shits and giggles, I swatted Seamus with a lump of meat that was either one of my arms or one of my legs. The difference no longer mattered here. I just laughed, and the beast laughed right along with me. Like we were old buddies. Like he and I had this whole big con planned from the very moment of my conception, and Seamus was the intended mark the entire time. Like we were one and the same. Blood ran from my empty ear sockets because the drums inside had long since ruptured down here, but we still laughed all the same.

  The beast was absolutely right. This is where I belonged. My home, my soul’s resting place, is right here, in the ninth circle of Hell.

  LAST.

  LAUGH.

  KINGSTON.

  And I think, despite all of the horrors I’d seen and felt and witnessed and, frankly, caused, both in the world above and this one below, that moment, when the beast called me by name, made me both the most proud and the most scared. Proud, because I’d served it all my life, without even knowing, and it knew me. Scared, because it only speaks to torment. Torment far beyond anything that poor little Seamus could conceive.

  I couldn’t blink. My eyelids were gone. My eyes burst.

  Then, after a moment, th
ey were back. My eyes. My eyelids. My whole body. Whole, unharmed, completely scar-free. Wearing my best suit. The one I always wore when I had a job because you can never wash out the smell.

  Only this time, there was no smell. I was disappointed.

  I was sitting in a gold-plated arm chair in front of a long dining table filled with every meal you could imagine in an immaculate white room. The most calming, soothing music fills the air. And there, at the other end of the table, was Seamus. My favorite victim. Also whole and unharmed. This time, I didn’t bother trying to contain my joy. Just the thought of the two of us whittling each other down to bloody numbs only to be reborn and ready to do it again until the end of time gave me the biggest hard-on I’ve had in my entire miserable existence.

  I picked up the butter knife in front of me. I wanted to make this time last. I strolled over to Seamus, but he still didn’t move. He just looked at me with the dullest eyes.

  Are you ready to play now, Seamus?

  I gave him a quick knick with the butter knife.

  No blood. Not even a scratch on him. He didn’t even flinch. I grab his hair, pull back his head, and plunge the butter knife into his eye. But the knife just bent like it was the weakest rubber. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even move.

  Enough of that. I saw a turkey in the middle of the table with the carving knife still inside. I grabbed it, took it back to Seamus, and started hacking away on his wrist. He didn’t even fight back. He didn’t even look at me. And the damned knife wouldn’t cut. Nothing. I tossed the knife and just hauled off and hit Seamus in the jaw. It was like punching Jello. All give. Nothing solid at all. He didn’t say a word. He just looked up at me and smiled with a full row of teeth. No gaps.

  I throttled him, but there was nothing to squeeze or to break. I put my thumbs in his eyes, but they didn’t budge an inch. I bit his forehead, but it just stretched like rubber.

  I sweated and groaned in frustration. I grabbed Seamus by the collar to throw him to the ground. He just stood up easy. I couldn’t even get a grip on him to toss him. I tried to shove him, but he was just out of reach.

  Goddamnit!

  I hit him with a plate. A chair. The fucking turkey. Nothing. Nothing! This was bullshit. I ran for the door.

  But there was no door. No windows. Just me and Seamus, in peace and prosperity for all eternity. And, despite the lack of windows, a gentle breeze passed through the room. It filled the whole space, like an all encompassing embrace, full of affection, compassion and forgiveness.

  It was the breath of God.

  Just a whiff, but enough to let me know what had happened.

  Hell is not a place. It’s a state of mind that only equals one word, even for those who serve it.

  Suffering.

  And Seamus laughed. It was the laugh of the beast.

  That cheating bastard. He’d sent me to Heaven after all.

  The End

  Also by Damon Young:

  The Worst Place on Earth

  The Monster That Ate My Summer Vacation

  The Trick-or-Treaters

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously. And resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 Damon Young

  3nd Edition

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Damon Young

  Follow Damon Young on Twitter: @dayfornight

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