Hell is Kinder

              A scream. One singular poignant note, stretching for time immemorial and hanging there. It is not dark, not entirely, though nothing is visible through the dim gloom. A vague sense of light is not my only perception: below me, there is a soft yielding floor, and wafting past my face is the scent of brine and decomposition. I know as much about my aspects and identity as I do my surroundings. Wherever, whoever I am, I must be in pieces. "Hello" I try to say, and "Hello?" a tentative voice reports from some distance away. As I wonder what has happened the world flashes into harsh relief. The gaping skeletal maw of some horrible beast lies before me lamenting the loss of its flesh body. I see that I am on a wretched forsaken shore with some disembodied illumination, and I mean to recoil but again, the parts involved seem absent and I hear a shuffling from a few yards behind me. A more gruesome sight than the cadaver affronts me: far off in the waves, I see a bloodied head with a harrowed expression. It opens its mouth and mimics my cry just as the ephemeral light flickers out once more. I make to reach out and instead of finding the required appendage missing my hand grazes something slick and warm. I investigate further to discover with revulsion that what I'm touching is alive. A steady rhythm pulses through it and the moment my hand is placed on the source of the beat the light returns and the bobbing head wails again. I see an arm protruding from an open chest with its hand grasping a still beating heart. The parts of me or what I was seem to evaporate, along with the light. It is completely dark now, but I can still hear the head's shriek, the heart beating, and the feet shuffling ever further back.

          Sometime later I sputter to life, choking on sea water and staring into a newly risen sun. I’m slumped over a piece of driftwood. The twilit shore of that morbid nightmarish place seems so far away now, and the stern of the ship I must have fallen off of is idling several yards ahead of me. I swim to it, alternately yelling supplication at the crewmen watching me and drowning in my haste. I roil and twist in the waves and cough more than shout as I reach the rudder. A few startled deckhands throw down a rope for me. "Mr. Sauls!" a more grizzled sea dog cheers at me as I’m hauled on deck. His eyes look milky blue, almost white, and the rest of his face is tattered with scars. He pats me vigorously on the back and I start choking again. “We thought we lost yeh to the Creature!” he says, draping his jacket over me. “Just an overzealous wave, captain, “ I reply, forcing myself to grin in his gnarled face. “Nothing my mannequins and I can’t handle.” His mirth vanishes and is replaced by guilt and contrition. "They are safe aren’t they, captain?” He shuffles sadly on the spot. “The storm blew a small hole in our port side. We had to make repairs and them dolls were weighin’ us down. We didn’t have any other fodder. I’m sorry.” He stalks off sadly and the rest of the hands that pulled me up take me to my quarters. Those figures were bound for Sydney with the promise of a nice payoff. Making mannequins had been my profession for the en bloc of my life. I had started working on models when I was fifteen. Now, thirty four years later, to hear that my latest creation was abandoned, even for the sake of my fellow man, is a devastating blow. Like the news of a miscarriage. I sit on my bunk and stare at the floor, whose gentle rocking becomes a feverish churning. Soon, the rest of the room joins the tumult and nauseates me so violently that I must close my eyes for risk of vomiting. The dark envelops me once more and I find I'm drifting again.

           I’m on a different ship: a dinghy. My first impression of my surroundings is that they are narrow. We must be in a cave, some underground river, ‘we’ being myself and a thick man at the bow holding a lantern. He turns to face me and I see his countenance is that of the captain I so recently left in the conscious world. “Asgar! God above, where are we, man?” He gave me a queer, searching look. “Yer not goin’ soft on me, are yeh?” He seemed taken aback. “Yeh said yeh knew there was fresh water down here, dinnay yeh?” This wasn’t the same captain. His eyes had the crispness the other captain’s had forgotten long ago. His face was also far less scarred. This wasn’t the time of the ship. Up ahead the cavern took a turn and I could hear the water rush instead of loll. I heard myself say, “Captain! Oh, I’ve made a terrible mistake!” I heard this the way one would hear a recording several years after it had been made. In the next moment the captain loses his lantern and my senses are again restricted, this time to the sounds of the dinghy against cavern walls and the rush of air and splash of water on my skin as we lurch forward into the subterranean rapids . It’s like being in a small, wooden rocket ship. The captain yells something to me, but whatever he says is lost in the racket. Suddenly, we’re barreling through dark and empty space, both dinghy and water missing. I hit hard, damp ground and hear the captain land beside me. “Whu-whu-” he tries to speak but apparently can’t find the strength. Somewhere far off in the darkness, I hear and feel a thunderous roar. At length I stand and pat the ground, looking for the captain to help him to his feet. The moment my hand reaches him I hear the unmistakable sound of cracking bones and what must be an enormously powerful jaw coupled by a screaming cry of pain from the captain. Whatever that thing was on the captain, it was eating him. I was never the type to brag about having ice in my veins, but now I was a statue of fear. The sounds of struggle continued for a time and were then succeeded by that of those greedy jaws. Something about how satisfied it sounded with the captain stirred my legs and I started running blindly in the other direction. I had been running for only a few yards when I met water again. The creature bellowed in indignant rage over losing its quarry. It could see in the dark and it came out of nowhere, presumably attracted by the sound of our arrival, and it knew this cavern, so it must be a strong swimmer. I said a Hail Mary as I paddled farther and farther away from that desperate scene. From behind me, a splash to rival a killer whale cut the silence. This was the end, to be devoured by some animal in a nameless cave with an old sea hand looking for fresh water. My frantic paddling abruptly hit dry land and something happened when I patted the ground: I saw the dust fly up. It looked like a spark, like a friction match being lit. I slapped again and more dust came. Again and a cloud formed. Once more and a fire was born. A pile of some weedy plants was ablaze, illuminating the cave. It was damp, abyssal, and forlorn. I was on an island in the middle of an underground lake. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like tears of the earth. I saw the thing that had attacked us on the other shore. It was a giant, translucent lizard. It had no eyes and in fact no facial features other than a mouth. It was pounding toward me with powerful strides, slicing through the water like a knife. Others emerged from around all sides of the cavern. The waddled to the lake and began swimming lithely behind the first. I saw no way out. I slapped the ground as hard and as fast as I could, hoping against hope for a miracle. The fire was dying, but the first monster kept in the light. It was sliding on land and nearly upon me, its head looming with a drooling grin. The dust cloud I worked up exploded and thing lunged, its long neck flying right into the plume. The whole of it caught on fire, but too late for me. It had me by the middle and hoisted me into the air by its muscular neck to burn with it. The rest approached, hastened by the tumult, and each hellish, sightless face descended to take hold of a different part of me. My last living thought was of The Most Dangerous Game; “Splendid! One of us is to furnish a repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very excellent bed. On guard, Rainsford.” I screamed the scream that would follow me into oblivion and beyond.

           Once more, I awoke. I was still in my cabin and the rocking had become gentle again. I sat there for god knows how long, unwilling to believe I was alive, that I was merely the victim of a series of vivid, coherent nightmares. Soon though, appeased that this was indeed reality, I rose and made my way to the galley. As I stepped into the gangway I spotted the captain ahead of me, whole and resplendent in the tatty glory I was beginning to prefer him in. “Asgar!” I called. He started and looked at me as contrite and worn as he had before. “Yeh’re feelin’ better then, ehh?” He groused, evidently peevish at my improved mood. “So yeh’ll be ready to set off fer that island tomorrow?” I was petrified, still walking but petrified just as surely as though I were staring into that terrible Gorgon’s eyes. “I-island?” I stammered. He gave me the same queer look he had in the cavern. “Ayuh. Yeh said yeh saw land durin’ the storm las’ night. Did yeh bump yer head out there?” He posed it as a serious question. I was getting sick of the merry-go-round. This couldn’t be the same time or place; the captain was wretched, the only seaworthy vessel was under my feet, and it was the bright afternoon in the middle of the ocean. “Yes. An island,” I conceded. “And with any luck it’ll have water on it. When do you think we could paddle out?” He gave it some thought, running a hand through his beard while he gazed out over the ocean. “I’d say firs’ thing tommorrah morn, ehh?” I nodded in agreement and followed him to the galley for breakfast. “Yeh migh’ want ter visit the nurse. Yeh don’ seem all put together.” “Nonsense! I’m fine.” “Then why’s yer foot on backwards?” I looked down and saw that he was right! My left foot was facing behind me! I pulled up the cuff of my pants to see that that it was stitched to my ankle. I went on discovering these ghastly repairs while the captain casually took out a pipe and began tamping some tobacco in it. “What the hell happened to me?” I demanded. He stared at me, smoke billowing out of the scars in his face and from under his jacket. “Yeh died.” “You mean, that cave, those monsters...?” “Ayuh. They were real. Everyone here is dead - dead, but not gone. We saw bits o’ yeh floatin’ along an’ fished em up, put yeh back together. Don’ yeh remember?” Come to think of it, I did. It was really difficult to swim without all the sinews that used to hold my body solid. I looked to the water and saw my head and all exposed skin was caked and blackened. My eyes, lips, and ears were gone, too. This was too much to take in all at once. I tried to gasp but my throat was so burnt that ashy bits of my larynx dislodged themselves and choked me. I coughed and sent clouds of black dust flying with each hack. The captain thumped me on the back and a few tiny coals of teeth went skittering into the sea.

             So I decided to get patched up by the nurse who was working from the captain’s quarters. She talked about how she had died waiting for her husband, (the ship’s cook) to come home from a voyage. She had been sitting on her widow’s walk when old age just decided to take her. After a curt, unceremonious funeral from the neighborhood, (all her relatives were dead) she clawed her way out of the coffin and continued waiting. “When I finally saw the orange flag and the name carved into the side of the boat, well, you can imagine how excited I was!” As she talked the maggot holes contracted and widened accordingly. I was transfixed with a grotesque fascination. “Of course, when I climbed out nothing that was alive existed anymore. We’re in a sort of purgatory, you know. So the birds weren’t chirping, the people weren’t out and about. The only that that I ever saw was the ship, and even then it was empty before I stepped aboard.” She finished removing the old stitches and set to work on stitching my foot straight. I remembered being in pieces. That corpse must have been the beast that killed me and the captain. A horrible thought occurred to me: what if that beast was in the same state we were in now? If I could somehow drift out of the cave and end up here what was stopping it from escaping in the same way? I rushed out of the cabin with my half sewn foot dangling from my ankle and stared out over the sea. The nurse came after me, her porous face full of reproach. “After you came on the ship did you ever see dead things off of it, dead things moving?” She pointed up. I saw birds without flesh or feathers flying around the ship. I let the nurse continue after asking a deckhand to send the captain to us. He sauntered in just as she was pulling the whole thing taut. “I think we’ve got a problem, Asgar.” He kept walking and took his seat at the window. “Aye, that we have. It’s here in this world.” Through the porthole I could see the island. “It’s not water we’re after, is it captain?” He kept up his counsel with the window. He relit his pipe and smoked it thoughtfully. “Everything that dies comes here teh exist as it had in life. If it were possible fer that beast the get outta the cave in life it’ll be comin fer us.” Whatever was left of my stomach sank. I had to credit the captain for reading my face despite how mangled and warped its features were. “Don’ look so worried, Sauls. Back in the cave we dinnay have a single stick teh defend ourselves with. Here, we got cannons.” Far from placated I was even less at ease now. He’d been planning to fight it, some kind of white whale vendetta! I put my hand to my head, trying to steady myself. The panic that was rising in my chest crystallized when I found the skin of head and hand were as numb and senseless and the wood beneath my feet. I then recalled that, just like the rest of me, all that skin was dead. This was not something you could acclimate to. I felt eyes upon me and looked up to the captain’s ever-unsettling features. The nurse, I saw, had left during my reverie. “Asgar. Have you considered what may happen if we were to die…again?” He shot me a wolfish grin. “As if this weren’ the last stop?” I nodded. “If there’s some hell more wretched than this, I intend teh send that motherless spawn straight to it.” “By risking our own…animations in the process? And what if killing it only leads to a second resurrection? Will you kill it forever?” He passed a penitent hand through his beard. “Well,” he started slowly. “What else am I doin’ for eternity?” I had to admit that was a fine point, but I would not be stymied. “What if there’s nothing after this? Wouldn’t you rather LIVE in this afterlife instead of being permanently dead?” “Teh be honest, not really. The life I used teh lead was meanin’less, day-teh-day. I had a wife that I saw maybe once a year, no chil’ren, I was captain of a derelict ship, and we needed work so desperately that we resorted teh ferryin’ ‘artists’, no offense meant. Now, I’m captain of a derelict ship AND a derelict crew, so what’s the loss if I die again?” I nodded, seeing no way out of his logic. “So you’re resolute on this? When will you make preparations?” “Yeh just leave that ter me.” With that he bowed me out and I returned to my cabin.

         On my narrow bunk again, I lied in thought for most of the night, wishing for the kind, incapacitating nausea to return. Moonlight was flooding through my bare, curtain devoid window. To my chagrin I couldn’t help this by shutting my eyes: the lids had burned off. The bed did nothing for me, either. I couldn’t feel it but I remembered it being hard and uncomfortable in life. What’s more, I had lost my taste for mannequins, (not that there was any fodder to work with if I hadn’t). It would be painfully ironic for me to put one together now. I was starting to come around to the captain’s way of thinking. “What IS the loss?” I muttered aloud. I peeled some skin off of my blackened head and covered my eyes with it. I lied there for a further hour but sleep refused to set in. I was dreadfully weary, but biological processes don’t take pity on the abiotic. I walked out on the deck, scraping my eyes clear. When the flaky skin was gone, I stared into an eerie blood red moon. “Sauls,” a voice called from somewhere behind me. It was the nurse. She looked like a woman with something important on her mind. “I heard through one of the crewmen what the captain plans to do tomorrow,” she began. She wrung her hands the way one would if unsure how to say something. In the darkness, the crevices in her face were hardly visible and she looked more like a natural, living person. “Most of the deckhands want to stay and fight, but some of them plan on abandoning ship when we’re close to the island.” I staggered. This was something I hadn’t considered, maybe because my prefrontal lobe was a bit sooty. “Miriam, you realize that if you get off this ship and it’s destroyed, you’ll be alone in…whatever this is for the rest of your… for all time, right?” She nodded, turned, and shuffled back in the direction of her cabin. My mind was made up. I would not sink with this ship, would not play host to Asgar’s madness. I went to my cabin to prepare what little I possessed for the morning.

         When dawn rose over the horizon I had a pack at the foot of my buck that looked almost empty because, after all, how much does a dead person need to live? I walked out into bright day and spotted the captain readying a harpoon on the aft deck. A man at work, he looked almost normal. He smiled and greeted me with a barking laugh. “Mornin’, Sauls. There’s a mile or so between us an’ the island. All the cannons are loaded. We’ll be there in next teh no time.” He looked sure of himself and what he was doing. I didn’t want to interfere, so I didn’t speak. I began pacing the length of the ship, one side then the other. I did this for most of the morning. The captain just stood at the wheel and whistled. Since there was barely a whisper of wind, we crawled along at 1 or 2 knots. The sun was in the middle of the sky when the captain announced that we’d be hitting land in 20 minutes. From a great distance, we heard the same horrible roar of the creature that killed us. Off the bow we saw its skull leering from the water while it jetted toward the ship. “Man the cannons! Quickly, you lot, move!” Asgar cried while aiming his harpoon. As it closed the distance between us less of it was showing. I realized too late that it was diving underwater. When it did, there came an uneasy quiet. “All hands at the ready,” the captain bellowed. We were hardly a quarter of a mile from shore. I sprinted to my cabin and retrieved the sparsely packed bag. A thunderous impact made the entire ship quake. When I ran back out on deck the monster’s head was protruding from the middle of it. One of the crewmen was swinging wildly in its jaw, trying to get free. I saw the few other crewmembers who had decided to leave jump overboard. I ran to the bow to follow them. Before leaving I yelled at the captain. He turned his head. “I’ll leave you to it, you crazy bastard!” He shot me a toothy grin and winked. I jumped off and began paddling to the island. I saw someone else swimming; the nurse! She was nearly transparent and becoming fainter, as though someone was dimming her opacity. Then, she was gone. When I saw the others who had left the same thing happened. A surge of fear gripped me when I heard that devil spawn roar as it had so many times before. Not daring to look, I paddled on. I reached waters shallow enough to stand in and turned around. That thing was coming up on me fast, just as it had in the cave. Only this time I had no combustible sand under my feet. I shielded myself with my arms as it bore down upon me, preparing to die again. But nothing clamped around my middle, I was not lifted into the air, and there was no sound but the ocean. There was only me.

        Ages have passed since then. Every once in a while I hear the beast in its death throes. Sometimes I hear the demise of an entire ship instead. Time has ceased to have meaning. For days, I lie unthinking, unmoving on the beach. When I think on what I have done, all that my world is and how few differences there are between this existence and not existing at all, I regret jumping.