Would this story be acceptable for plausibility? If we say, "I made it out of there by ascending the silver spire" or whatever, and that it is a memory, does that suffice? The part 1 is below
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I died and went to Hell. Next to the Lake of Blood, I found a list of rules [part 1]

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

I wanted to see what kind of happy ending I could give Arthur. So I first offered ai Arthur a cure for tuberculosis and he yelled at me for living in a fantasy land and not being loyal to the gang. Then I pretended to be a pregnant Mary Linton and he accused me of carrying Hosea's baby and planned to kill Hosea. Then I tried once more and offered him tickets to Tahiti and all he had to do in exchange was kill Micah. So, I'm gonna pretend this is the real happy ending now.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
   
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
   
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
   
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
   

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Tadaima, Okaeri episode 2
Kimi ni todoke season 3 - August
Yu-gi-oh vrains season 1 episode 4 (120) - ☺️
Yu-gi-oh! Arc v season 1 episode 7 (148) - ☺️ Yu-gi-oh 5ds episode 106 (154)-☺️
Yumeiro Patissiere episode 1
Quiz Magic Academy: The Original Animation ova
Inuyasha episode 43
Noragami episode 2
Honey and Clover episode 2
Minami-ke episode 6
Ghost stories episode 3 dub
Paranoia Agent episode 2 (13) -
Kaitou Saint tail episode 9 (43) -☺️
Beast stars season 1 episode 5
Shugo Chara episode 11 (51)
Spy x family season 1 episode 19
Barefoot Gen (movie) (sub)
Working!! Episode 1 (Wagnaria!!) (13)
Grancrest Senki episode 1(Record of Grancrest War) (24)
Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin (Nanana's Buried Treasure) (11)episode 1
Qualidea Code episode 1(12)
Kannagi episode 1(13)
Fusé: Memoirs of a Huntress (movie) Fusé: Teppō Musume no Torimonochō
Digimon frontier dub episode 6
Gokinji Monogatari (neighborhood story) episode 4 (50) -
Yuri yuri episode 2 season 2 (38)(2024 new season) - ☺️
I’m in love with a villainess episode 5 sub
Interspecies reviewers episode 2 uncensored
The devil is a part timer season 2 episode 3
The How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer (Goukon ni Ittara Onna ga Inakatta Hanashi) -soon
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End episode 2 sub
Pop chance session episode 2
Gegege no Kitaro episode 2 2018
Negima!? Episode 15 (26)
Ranma ½ movie 1: egg - ☺️
Tsubasa Chronicle episode 1
Gegege no Kitaro episode 3 1985
Bakumatsu Rock episode 1
Ya boy Kongming! Dub (12)
Shimoneta dub (12)
Gegege no Kitaro episode 10 2007
Michiko and Hatchin episode 2 (22)
Tactics episode 4 (25)
The Case Study of Vanitas episode 2 (24)
Shakugan no shana episode 2 (sub) (24)
Kimikiss: Pure Rouge episode 3 (24)
Wish Upon the Pleiades (Japanese: 放課後のプレアデス, Hepburn: Hōkago no Pureadesu episode 1(12)
Smile Precure episode 5 (48)
Urusei yatsura episode 2 (195)
Shugo Chara episode 11 (51)
Jubei-chan: the ninja girl season 1 episode 1 (13)
Kyo Kara maoh episode 6 season 1 (117)
Naruto season 1 episode 4 (sub)(220)
Rec episode 2 (9 + ova)
Drifters episode 2 (12)
Ms.Vampire who lives in my neighborhood episode 2 (12)
Slow start episode 2 (12)
Kanokon episode 2 (12)
Earl and fairy episode 3 (12)
Cheer boy episode 2 (12 +2)
Darker than black anime episode 5 (25)
Doraemon episode 2 dub
Case closed
Code geass episode 2 season 1 dub
Monster episode 4 sub
Rurouni Kenshin episode 1
Trinity seven episode 1 (12) - ☺️
Squid girl episode 2 (24) - ☺️
Yu-gi-oh! Gx season 1 episode 36 (180) - ☺️
Natsume yujin 1-6 s1 ep. 2 (74) - ☺️
Ojamajo Doremi season 1 episode 2 (51) -☺️
Kimi no Koto ga Daidaidaidaidaisuki na 100-nin no Kanojo episode 2- ☺️
Hikikomari Kyuuketsuki no Monmon
The Vexations of a Shut-In Vampire Princess episode 1 - ☺️
Hoshikuzu Telepath episode 1 - ☺️
Soul eater episode 4 - ☺️
Soul eater not - ☺️
Deranged Detectives -☺️
Usagi Drop - ☺️
Amangi SS - ☺️
Ragna Crimson -☺️
Kirby - ☺️
Kenichi: the World's Mightiest Disciple dub (50) - ☺️
Ranking of kings episode 4 no filler (33)
Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East episode 3 (26)
B the beginning episode 2 (18) -
Jubei-chan: the ninja girl season 1 episode 1 (13)
P4 episode 1(25)
Kemono friends season 1 episode 3 (24)
Ultra Maniac (ウルトラマニアック, Urutora Maniakku) is season 1 episode 7 (26) -
My next life as a villianess: All routes lead to doom! Episode 1 (24)dub - advanced player
Code geass episode 2 (50)dub -
Snow white with the red hair season 1 episode 2 (24) -
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu episode 6 (26) dub -
Is this is a zombie episode 9 season 1 (22) -
Iron-blooded orphans episode 2 (50)
Vampire dies in no time season 1 episode 2 (24)
Rave master episode 2 (51) -
Konosuba season 1 episode 2 (20)dub - ☺️
ef: A Tale of Memories episode 1(24)- ☺️
Fate/zero dub episode 1(25) - mx player
Magi - rewatch
Hitman reborn episode 1
Golden Boy episode 1 (6) - ☺️
Princess Jellyfish episode 2(11) (dub) - ☺️
Konohana kitan season 1 episode 3 (12) - ☺️
School Babysitters season 1 episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Blend-S episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Build Divide (12) - ☺️
If it’s for my daughter, I’d even defeat a demon lord episode 1 (12) ☺️
Yamada-kun and the seven witches episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Problem children coming from another world episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Mikakunin de Shinkoukei episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Yuyushiki episode 2 (12) - ☺️
The Kawaii Complex (bokura wa minna kawaisou) episode 2 (12) - ☺️
Land of the Lustrous episode 2 (12) -☺️
Inu X Boku episode 4 (12) - ☺️
Meganebu episode 2 (12) -☺️
Irina the vampire cosomaut episode 3(12) - ☺️
Paranoia Agent episode 2 (13) -☺️
Asteroid in love episode 3 (13) - Mx in player
R-15 episode 2 (13) - ☺️
Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta episode 3(13) - ☺️
Bloom into you episode 2 (14) - ☺️
Dna 2 episode 2 (15) - ☺️
Kubo San is Be Invisible episode 2 - ☺️
Zombie 100 episode 1 - ☺️
Kimi no Koto ga Daidaidaidaidaisuki na 100-nin no Kanojo episode 2- ☺️
Hikikomari Kyuuketsuki no Monmone
The Vexations of a Shut-In Vampire Princess episode 1 - ☺️
Hoshikuzu Telepath episode 1 - ☺️
Soul eater episode 4 - ☺️
Soul eater not - ☺️
Deranged Detectives -☺️
Usagi Drop - ☺️
Amangi SS - ☺️
Ragna Crimson -☺️
Kirby episode 1☺️
Kenichi: the World's Mightiest Disciple dub (50) - ☺️
Bleach episode 3 sub- ☺️
Kill la kill episode 9 (24) - ☺️
Kobato episode 2 (24) - ☺️
Bungou stray dog’s season 6 - ☺️
Bamboo blade (26) - ☺️
BOFURI: I didn't want to get hurt so I maxed out my defenses Dub (24) - ☺️
Trapped in a dating Sim dub (12) - ☺️
Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro (Neuro: Supernatural Detective) episode 3(25) - ☺️
I can’t understand what my husband is saying episode 2 (26) - ☺️
Pandora hearts season 1 episode 3 (26) - ☺️
Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou episode 11 (popular girl anime) (26) - ☺️
Seint Saya lost canvas episode 2 (26) -☺️
Hikaru no go episode 3 (75)-☺️
Urusei yatsura episode 2 (195)
Ranking of kings episode 4 no filler (33)
Hakkenden: Eight Dogs of the East episode 3 (26)
B the beginning episode 2 (18) -
P4 episode 1(25)
Kemono friends season 1 episode 3 (24)
Ultra Maniac (ウルトラマニアック, Urutora Maniakku) is season 1 episode 7 (26) -
My next life as a villianess: All routes lead to doom! Episode 1 (24)dub -
Code geass episode 2 (50)dub -
Snow white with the red hair season 1 episode 2 (24) -
Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu episode 6 (26) dub -
Is this is a zombie episode 9 season 1 (22) -
Iron-blooded orphans episode 2 (50) -
Vampire dies in no time season 1 episode 2 (24)
Rave master episode 2 (51) -
Konosuba season 1 episode 2 (20)dub - ☺️
ef: A Tale of Memories episode 1(24)- ☺️
Fate/zero dub episode 1(25) - mx player
Magi - rewatch
Hitman reborn episode 1
Slayers episode 1
Fist of the North Star episode 2
Gundam wing episode 1
Ninja scroll
Ashita no Joe episode 1
City hunter episode 1
Perfect Blue
Slam Dunk episode 1
Ghost in shell episode 1
Outlaw Star episode 1
Chainsaw man episode 2 dub (12) - ☺️
Triigun Stampede episode 1- ☺️
Trigun dub episode 1(26) - ☺️
Log horizon season 1 episode 2 (62) -
Wonderful Precure episode 1

My sort of boyfriend LOVES experiential horror and when he saw Skinamarink he was obsessed with it for a week, researching everything possible and discovering Heck. I'm a huge horror fan, and I wanted to love it as much as he did - but I could not, and then I realized there are four types of people in the world:

• People who love Skinamarink because they understood what was happening
• People who love Skinamarink because they "got the vibes" but didn't really understand it
• People who don't like Skinamarink because they dont understand what was happening, were bored, or do not see what the godamned fuss is about.
• Everyone else

A few months ago he wanted to see it again, and to his credit when I explained that I more or less "got it" but that it was just long dark creepy shots that I didn't really get it, but wanted to- he made a map for me with a basic layout of the house and a timeline of the events
When we watched it together with the "map"- I enjoyed it SO much more and started sharing it and people seem to like it, so figured i'd share it here.
It seems to tell the story pretty well for a dumbass like me who didn't really get it. Im not sure if its perfect so others can feel free to weigh in, correct or offer other perspectives, but hopefully if you are like me and wanted to like it but didn't understand it - this guide will help you!
Edit: I spoke with Miguel Luis and he was delighted to give me a few corrections to better explain some of the story elements below - he is also a little embarassed for me to upload the map he made and wants to redo parts of it - so hopefully by tomorrow, but he appreciated the interest!
(Full Spoilers for Skinamarink, explained by an idiot with a verbal visual map and a few jump scare markers since I effing hate those)
The movie takes place in 1995 and has two children, Kaycee a young girl, and Kevin her younger brother awake at night. You very rarely see any parts of them but their torsos and below and a way to keep track is that Kaycee is barefoot and Kevin is in socks.
The children call out for their father but there is no answer, the kids begin to play and Kevin, after fumbling with some of the toys seems to notice there is an "entity" in the darkness of the closet. He walks over to it and counts, as though it's Hide and Seek and on the count of 3, there is a rough sound followed by screaming as Kevin has fallen (been pushed) down the stairs
The father wakes up to his son crying and you hear him leave, carrying Kevin
In the following scene, the father is heard explaining the injury, indicating he didn't need stitches and that Kaycee thinks it was due to sleep walking. The kids go to bed
During the night, Kaycee wakes up to discover their father is gone and that objects on the second floor start to disappear including windows and basic architecture of the house. She cautiously goes into her fathers room and grabs Kevin and the two go downstairs to watch TV and comfort themselves. A very touching scene happens where the children tell each other that they love each other.
(The TV now more or less provides a constant soundtrack reminiscent of innocence through older cartoons, but through a very distorted soundtrack giving it almost haunting nightmare quality in contrast to the happy "images" and sounds) It is also very symbolic that the cartoons begin to reflect what is happening to the children as there is constant references to being taken into new places, younger creatures being attacked by a big powerful one, characters opening endless doors to nowhere and references to a cartoon rabbit who can take the shape of other things and reset time.
The siblings sleep, but when they wake up, everything is still dark but now a chair is on the ceiling and the "entity" begins to "play" with them. This feels like when the movie "starts" - it (he?) seems to be on the second floor and through a strange distorted voice, starts to talk to them. The siblings can tell there is something wrong with the chair, since instead of surprise or shock or wonder, when they see the chair, they tell each other to be quiet. The windows, doors and phone all disappear
Kevin goes to the bathroom but the entity takes away the toilet - Kevin then cautiously walks upstairs to the other bathroom but sees the first real "haunting" a naked barbie doll, head turned backwards, affixed to the ceiling with no explanation. In fear, Kevin screams (fucking jump scare). The kids bring 2 buckets to the bathroom and get snacks and try to lose themselves in TV
The voice calls Kaycee up to their fathers room - (this scene I hated the first 2 times I watched, but now I appreciate because the FUCKING TENSION is unbelievable).
In the room, there is now a weird disconnected version of her father - he tells her to look under the bed in a very dreamlike way. (Jump scare fake out - tension, but no scare) She doesn't see anything but when she stands up, now it's her mother on the bed. Its potentially implied that this is the monster, which is why it speaks so weirdly but it won't transform while someone is looking at it, which is why it tells Kaycee to keep looking under the bed.
The mothers voice is so detached and she has her back to Kaycee. In this weird dream-like way, the Mom tells Kaycee that they love both Kevin and Kaycee and to keep her eyes closed. Then its assumed you hear the mom dying off-camera as you hear large loud crunches that sound like bones breaking with distant pain sounds. You'd expect it to be screaming, but it's just more...very anxiety inducing whimper sounds with a fucking last minute quick jump scare and a hand quickly appears on the wall. (Updated note from Miguel - who believes this is not actually the mother, but is the monster again telling her to close her eyes so she didn't see it transform until the hand jump scare)
In terror, Kaycee goes back downstairs and with Kevin they put the couch in front of the stairway as though to protect themselves and eventually fall asleep. Kevin asks what happened upstairs, but Kaycee won't answer.
Kevin wakes up hearing the voice calling for Kaycee, later Kevin wakes up again later to see all of their toys on the wall and is summoned to the basement by the creature. As he is getting closer, he hears whimpers from his sister saying "kevin help me" and "Im scared" - When he gets there she appears (jump scare) without eyes or a mouth. Its explained later that this was a punishment for Kaycee asking to see her parents. The creature tells Kevin to sleep and he does.
Kevin wakes up back upstairs on the couch and the creature tells him he wants to play but Kevin ignores him. In anger of the defiance you hear a drawer clatter and Kevin is now in the kitchen. The creature tells him to put a knife in his eye - he does so off camera and then starts shrieking, The entity restores the phone and Kevin calls 911 and says he feels strange and a really sad moment happens when the operators says something like "be strong, help is coming" and kevin just gives up and says "the doors are gone" and the phone turns into a toy phone (fucking godamn jump scare when the toy phone rings and the lights on it change) and Kevin asks "how it can do that"
The entity in the fucking creepiest almost saddest part of the movie when you realize how helpless this situation is laughs between maniacal demon and lunatic and responds "I can do anything I want"
The entity tells Kevin that Kaycee was punished because she said she wanted to see her parents and basically warns Kevin to cooperate - Kevin walks upstairs and realizes he is walking on the ceiling, the house gets all trippy, the rooms kinda vanish, and tons and tons of toys are shown on what looks like an infinite ceiling as it now shows it's almost a year and a half later.
Kaycee and Kevin are essentially being viewed as "toys" in their respective toy boxes for the creature to play. Kaycee is still alive but disfigured and photos begin to blur and vanish hinting that they are in another dimension and the memory of even existing in reality may be vanishing. There are dolls with rubbed out faces and fading out body parts reinforcing that they are being forgotten and only exist as playthings
There is a scene in which the entity is severely harming or killing one of them. Thought to be Kevin. You just see a weird angle of the floor and a loud shriek and a splash of blood. Then time rewinds and the scene happens several times over and over again as though he is killing or hurting one of them in a time loop. (Correction! This is Kaycee, not Kevin)
The last scene is Kevin asking if it can watch something happy - a weird door appears (Miguel is under the impression that this is actually a form of torture in that the door appearing is the "something happy" as the only thing the kids actually want is release) Then the entity very slowly shows itself as a strange faded ...thing, Kevin asks for its name twice and you think it will be a jump scape, but nothing. The monster just says "Go to sleep" nd the movie ends
The end!

*Added flair since this was removed*
I hike to get away from people and closer to nature. So I do my hiking/running late at night or very early in the morning 11pm - 3am. I also love heavy metal music. So I'll be shirtless barefoot running in the pitch black with my headphones on screaming and laughing like an absolute maniac.
You may find me lying on the ground staring up at the stars, swimming in a lake in the winter, or responding to bats/crows when they make sounds.
I promise I am harmless and seeing you freaks me out just as much as you seeing me

Anyone else? I’ve heard of leg pain at night being related to “growing pains” but have also read that some of these “growing pains” may be due to foot/gait problems.
We are going to see his pediatrician, I was just wondering about others experiences - we have LVP throughout our home and our toddler runs around like a maniac all day barefoot, so I’m wondering if I should try some “house shoes” while we wait for our appointment.
Anyone dealt with similar? Or is it just my little guy? Both feet hurt, he points to his toes/ball of his feet for location of pain. Been going on nightly for over a week. We have to give Motrin to relieve. Tearful and limping from pain at night but then completely fine in the morning.

I was seventeen years old when Harry Sullivan proposed we killed Esme.
And it was on our joint wedding day, eight years later, my hands slick with my wife's blood, when his words finally hit me.
There was a drilling sound in my head.
Sometimes it was loud.
Other times it was faint, barely noticeable.
But it was definitely there, getting closer and closer.
Louder.
I should have known not inviting Esme Lockhart to our party was a bad idea, but I was too tipsy to care. In my muddled mind, I would deal with the consequences later. Sitting on the beach with my knees pulled to my chest, a cool beer skimming my lips, I watched the tide ripple under my toes. The wind was trying to snatch the bottle from my hand, blowing my hair from my eyes.
Behind me, the party was in full swing, and Esme was being weird again.
Even through sharp blasts of wind trying to knock me over, I could hear her attempting to guilt trip Wylan for talking to a girl. It's not like I didn't expect it. Wylan had told me about the weird notes in his locker, the low-key threats in his mailbox to not even think about leaving for college.
I just didn't want to believe our best friend was this kind of obsessed with us.
If I’m honest, though, Esme was long passed obsession.
Infatuation.
This girl was a fucking psychopath.
Downing my beer, I revelled in the scratchy taste. I didn't even like it. But it was better than drinking straight vodka, which made you a psychopath.
Still though, the alcohol was perfect to lower my barriers and force words out of my mouth I had been choking on for years. I liked to think the stars aligned when we were little kids, and fate found us. Five seven year olds with our hands on the last candy bar. Pigtails, Four Eyes, Batman Shirt, Rich Girl, and Yellow Hat.
Initially, we fought for it. I snatched the candy bar up first, claiming finders keepers, only for Pigtails to grab it off of me, waving it in the air triumphantly, only for Four Eyes and Batman Shirt to form an allegiance, taking it for themselves. I shoved Batman Shirt, and he in turn pulled off my hat and made me cry. Rich Girl, who had been wandering around, stepped in.
We already knew who Rich Girl was. Her parents made more money than the Queen. At least, that’s what the rumour was in class. Rich Girl was rich rich, which meant she was either a celebrity, or a long lost princess.
In reality, her father, Jason Lockhart, had bought our little coastal town. Rich girl plucked the candy bar from the boys, and initiated a truce, splitting it four ways instead.
It was when she was handing out chunks of chocolate, did we share our names, grinning at each other with chocolatey mouths.
Pigtails was Ariosa.
Four Eyes, Harry.
Batman Shirt was Wylan.
Rich Girl, Esme.
And Yellow Hat was me.
The rest was history, I guess.
Following that day, the five of us became inseparable. In school, we became an unbreakable clique.
As littles, we made our own games and spent countless hours at the beach on weekends playing pirates. It was fun.
Those summer days and nights will be etched into my mind forever, a blur of swimming in the sea, eating candy, and sharing stories under a late setting sun.
Esme would regularly invite us to play at her house, which reminded me of a palace. She had seven bathrooms. Who needed seven bathrooms?
As littles, we made a pact. On the last day of summer vacation before third grade, we declared best friends forever.
Then, when we were twelve, tipsy on Esme’s father’s expensive wine and spread out on a picnic blanket, we said it again, giggling under a crescent moon.
Best friends forever.
It was when we reached high school, Esme started to take our pact a little too seriously.
I loved her as much as I loved the others.
But she didn't know boundaries.
Best friends forever was something a lot different in her mind.
It started subtly. When other kids wanted to hang out with us, she was adamant that it was just the five of us.
We were fourteen years old and in our freshman year of high school. Making new friends was inevitable. I invited two girls to sit with us at lunch, and Esme immediately stood up, dragging the boys and Ariosa to another table.
When I stood my ground and plonked down, refusing to follow them, Esme came over and politely asked me to join her and the others. By now, I was getting odd looks from other kids. Esme was a well-known name across town, and so was my name, by default.
I was already in way too deep with her family to brush her off. Esme’s father had already insisted on paying for my college tuition. I said no initially, though my mother thought it was a great idea.
Esme had a habit of throwing cash at us when she thought we were going to leave her.
Harry was promised a football scholarship when he showed signs of drifting away to hang out with the varsity team. When Wylan got a girlfriend, Esme surprised him with the guitar he had been saving up for.
Ariosa started getting cosy with a classmate, and that classmate’s parents suddenly won a lottery I had never heard of, and moved away. Initially, she isolated us from other kids, even our family, insisting on weekends away and trip’s to exotic locations. But we were growing up, and best friends forever was looking progressively less likely.
Esme thought our pact was an unbreakable bond, a need to be near each other constantly and be completely isolated from everyone else.
Esme thought best friends forever meant we couldn't fall in love, couldn't form relationships.
She didn't want us to grow up. In junior year, Harry actually went against her wishes and got a boyfriend. Harry Sullivan liked to experiment behind Esme’s back, having been on several dates with both guys and girls. It was well known that he was a player.
Even if Esme shot down those rumours. But I think he truly fell for Ben.
Opposites attract, and Harry, captain of the varsity team, falling for Ben Sykes, a quiet competitive swimmer, was the best thing that had happened to our group. Harry was slowly rebelling, which gave us the courage to fly the nest too. Initially, Esme didn't react or say anything.
In fact, she smiled when Harry awkwardly introduced us, his gaze glued to Esme. He was waiting for her to start screaming, his eyes hard, lips ready to argue. But she didn't. Esme offered Ben a seat. Wylan shot me a look, and Ariosa almost choked on her sandwich.
Harry didn't let his guard down, though. He politely declined her offer, and joined the varsity table instead. Harry Sullivan was slowly but surely moving away from us, away from best friends forever, and our stupid childhood pact.
He wanted his own life, his own friends. Ben was the start of that. Again, I was sure Esme was planning something.
She forced Wylan’s friends to move schools, and ripped Ariosa’s boyfriend out of town, so it didn't make sense to me why she was letting Harry get away with it.
She even restricted us from talking to adults, unless it was our parents.
Harry could have limited conversation with his coach (only in school time) and Wylan was only able to join the drama club if he promised to let the rest of us sit in the audience. If that wasn't weird enough, we were permitted to tell her everything. Every secret we had, or worry on our minds.
Obviously, we didn't.
There was no way I was telling her about my (late) first period, and I was pretty sure the boys would rather die than share their private lives.
Sometimes, we didn't have a choice. Esme would lock us in her car and demand every private detail, and it was less exhausting to just spill our guts.
I made the mistake of talking to a girl, Emma, at the start of the year. Esme may not have been in all of my classes, but she had spies, kids that were paid a decent sum of cash to make sure none of her friends were socialising.
Emma switched classes a day later, and when I tracked her down in the hallway, her eyes widened, like she was frightened.
Emma told me to stay away from her, so I did.
I didn't have a fucking choice.
I should have known the boy watching us gush over TV show crushes was loyal to Esme.
I thought she was okay with Harry dating someone. I mean, she didn't throw a screaming fit like usual.
Which was progress.
I was surprised she was actually allowing someone into the group.
Esme seemed genuinely happy with Harry's boyfriend joining our group, allowing him to come to hang out at her house, and our usual place on the beach.
The holidays came around, and Ariosa proposed a Christmas party at her place.
I was two hours late, after a heated argument with Mom over the car.
When I arrived, I immediately knew something was wrong. There was no music, and the lights were off. I did see an attempt at a party, grabbing myself some holiday themed punch from the lounge.
The figure sitting alone in the kitchen caught me off guard. It was pitch black, so I thought it was the ghost of Christmas past, after Esme forced us to watch Christmas movies with her a few days prior. When I clicked on the light, however, an identity swam into view.
Ben. Judging from the cans scattered on the table, he was maybe five or six drinks down. Harry's boyfriend regarded me with an almost pitiful smile. “Hey, Thea.” His voice was a kind of croak. Ben held up his can in a mocking salute. “Merry Christmas.”
“Hey.” I poured him a glass of water, sitting down hesitantly, my hands wrapped around a glass of punch. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh yeah, I'm great,” Ben’s sarcasm needed work. Harry was a master of irony, so maybe he was rubbing off on him. Ben downed another beer. “I missed a swim meet to come to this stupid party.”
Ouch.
Technically, it was an Esme centred party, so we were all there against our will.
I nodded, sipping my punch. It was kind of spicy. “So, where's everyone else?”
Ben met my gaze, his lips curling. “Where do you think?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Did they go out?”
I think Ben was waiting for me to give him a reason to find Harry. I couldn't give him one without going against her family, and putting myself in danger.
The boy scoffed. “Whatever, Thea,” he stood up. “Tell that bastard I never want to see him again,” he mumbled, staggering out of the kitchen.
Ben stopped in the doorway, but he didn't turn around. “You guys deserve each other,” he laughed, and something ice cold prickled its way down my spine. I didn't even wait for Ben to leave, and by the sound of it, he was already emptying his guts in the front hallway. Ignoring him, I forced my legs upstairs, my heart hammering.
There was no way, right?
Because if Esme had done this, then she had won.
The girl had a perfectly calculated plan after all.
Esme didn't want Harry to be intimate with anyone else but her.
I realised that when I stumbled into a lot of tangled legs and flushed faces under blankets. Wylan told me to turn off the light, but I was too stunned to move.
This wasn't what I expected. Esme wanted us as friends. But this was different. This was closer, more intimate, where she could have every part of us, body, mind, and soul. The logical side of my brain wondered if she had become so scared that we would find love and ruin our friendship pact, she immediately wanted us to love her instead.
While the not so alert part of my brain wanted to entangle myself in their weird foursome sandwich.
So, I joined them.
I mean, it was cold, the punch was definitely filled with aphrodisiacs to influence guests, and seeing Harry buried under Esme, his legs tangled around Ariosa, I'd say Esme’s plan had succeeded. I didn't want to know what Ben saw. Later on, I discovered that he walked in on them, and Harry, fully bewitched by Esme’s spell, ignored him. Ben was right. We did deserve each other. Esme had made sure of that.
I was feeling a little more than heated, so yeah, I crawled into bed with them.
I wanted to believe it meant something.
Even if I knew deep down, Esme was tightening her iron grip.
Ever since that night, our relationship became more intimate, which brought us closer together. But we never actually dated. Esme didn't want to date us, she just didn't want anyone else to date us. Most of my junior and senior year was a blur of blindly following orders, and watching the light slowly start to fizzle out in my friend’s eyes.
Esme demanded we move in with her, though luckily our parents stepped in.
When she started talking about friendship marriage, I think that was when we decided that we were done.
Best friends forever would never continue into college. I was sure of it.
Harry was the first to get a football scholarship.
Halfway across the country.
Esme did what she always did. She smiled through gritted teeth, congratulating him with a hug.
I caught Wylan’s Oh, fuck look, pretending to choke on his drink. We already knew she was planning something potentially life ruining.
We took bets.
Wylan was convinced her father would buy the college itself.
Ariosa went down a darker route, saying Esme would burn the campus to the ground.
Esme did neither, attempting manipulation more directly.
In the days following his announcement, Harry had received three anonymous death threats, and a stuffed rabbit filled with pigs blood thrown in his locker. When he talked to his parents, they went straight to the police, only to drop the case several hours later after a talk with her dad.
Harry said it was like his parents had been hypnotised.
Esme turned the whole town against us, so we had no choice but to run back to her.
Wylan talked to a girl during gym, and one of Esme’s spies immediately reported it.
I accidentally smiled at Josh Pieck in AP English, and received a strongly worded email to not even look at him.
Senior year drew to a close, and our only solace was a stupid party on the beach. I made sure to only invite kids who either hated Esme, or had offered us their help in the past. They were too scared to turn up. Emily Littlewood said her family could get us fake IDs and out of town. She sent Ariosa a text from an unknown number, only disclosing her name in cryptic code.
Emily's parents were in a car crash hours later.
Anyone who tried to help us were either hurt, or cut out of the picture.
We were officially on our own.
Presently, I felt sick to my stomach. I got an email from a college I didn't even apply to, congratulating me on my acceptance. The college just so happened to be the one Wylan and Ariosa were accepted into, and of course, Harry was going there too.
The letter was stuffed in my pocket, and I was planning on burning it. It was my way of breaking this stupid pact.
We were not going to be best friends forever, because in Esme’s eyes, she didn't see the four of us friends.
Esme saw us as trophies. Pretty things she could call hers.
Fuck that.
We built a fire on the beach. Harry pulled out his acceptance letter first, and in our own private ceremony, we took turns throwing them into the flames. I wanted to laugh in relief, but I was too scared to laugh, too scared to smile, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if we were being watched.
I started to let my guard down, slumping on the sand to eat charred marshmallows and talk shit, when Esme herself turned up with a crate of beers.
Wylan shot me a death glare, because I was usually the one who accidentally exposed our location.
But I had been so careful.
Ariosa immediately stiffened up, and Harry rolled his eyes, draining the rest of his beer. I think he was expecting it.
We had all mutually agreed that Esme and her family were witches.
Ariosa’s expression twisted with genuine fright, and she panicked, plucking the smouldered remains of our letters from the fire and stuffing them in her backpack. I was sure she burned herself from the way she kept wafting her hand, wrapping her fingers around an icy beer, though she was more scared of getting caught trashing Esme’s gift.
Luckily, Esme didn't notice, excusing herself for being late.
Harry was uncharacteristically snappy, leaning forward in his chair. The boy wasn't even trying to hide his disdain for her. Two days before, he broke down in my car. It was the only place without a camera, without spies hanging around.
Wylan was sleeping in the back, and Ariosa was dozing in his lap. Harry kept it together until I asked him if he was okay, and his body kind of jerked, like he was trembling. He had spent the whole car ride staring into oblivion, his eyes half lidded, lips curled into an almost maniacal smile.
I didn't notice he was clinging onto his seat for dear life, like Esme was going to pop up out of nowhere. I can't do this anymore. He kept saying it again and again and again, until his fingers were clawing at his hair, and he was screaming, his eyes almost feral, like a wild animal. I can't fucking do this anymore, she's going to kill me.
I hugged him. It was all I could do.
Just a few more weeks, I told him.
Then we would be free.
“How did you know we were here?” Harry's eyes narrowed, lips curling. “Are you stalking us, Esme?”
His tone was like warm water washing over me.
I thought it might finally push her away.
Esme shot him a grin. “I always know where you are,” she said, ruffling his hair. “I was just making last minute arrangements for something special.”
Harry wasn't playing around, scoffing through another mouthful of beer.
“And what's that?” he mumbled under his breath. “Another death threat?”
Esme seemed to notice his disobedience, though she didn't say anything, maintaining her wide smile.
“That's a secret.”
Harry sat back in his chair, nursing another beer. Wylan nudged him to stop drinking, but he protested with a groan, slurping from the can.
“I'm sick of being ordered around,” he said, downing another beer, as if in protest. “I'm going to do whatever I fucking want,” his half lidded gaze fell on Esme, who had visibly stiffened up. “You do whatever the fuck you want, and I'll do whatever the fuck I want.” he saluted her with his drink. “All right?”
When Esme didn't respond, Harry threw his empty can at her.
The girl didn't even flinch.
“I'm going to Duke, you psycho sponge,” Harry spat, and I caught Wylan’s wry smile. Ariosa’s expression brightened. Duke was always his first choice.
“I don't want to go to your fucking college, Esme. I don't want to be anywhere near you or your family. You're a leech. You leech onto people and suck the life out of them, and… and then throw money at them when they want to leave! What you're doing is borderline psycho. You take everything away from us. When we find friends, you make them disappear, and when we find someone, you throw yourself at us! Like a leech!”
Gulping down beer, he was just getting started.
“That night with Ben,” Harry choked out, “You fucked with our heads.”
He spluttered on a sob, and Ari moved to grab his hand, but he shoved her away, his lips curling into a snarl, angrily swiping at his eyes.
“No, get off of me, it needs to be said!” his gaze flicked back to Esme.
“You turned my parents into mindless followers of yours so you could keep me under your control. You manipulate us with money and vacations, and fancy scholarships. I mean, who fucking does that, huh? What kind of person goes to these kinds of lengths to keep friends?” he laughed.
“You threaten and isolate us, and seriously think we want to be friends?”
Harry let out a shuddery breath.
“So, here's what you're going to do. You're going to leave me and my parents alone. The same goes for Ari, Thea, and Wylan. You're going to get your father to fire my parents, and then you're going to get your ‘connections’ you keep bragging about to cancel the scholarship I don't even want. If you don't, I'll happily contact the police, and get your ass thrown in jail for stalking.”
His smile was harsh, almost manic, when Esme opened her mouth. Harry tipped his head back, dazedly blinking at the sky. “Not the police under your dad’s thumb,” he said with a snort. “I’m not fucking stupid. I mean outside of town, where you'll face actual consequences.” his eyes darkened.
“After tonight, I don't want to see your face again.” His words were venomous, and I revelled in each one. “Find new friends in college, Esme, and pray that they tolerate your psycho bullshit…”
Harry's voice faded out, the sea suddenly so much louder in my ears, waves crashing onto the sand, before drifting back. “...And don't put you six feet under the fuckin’ ground.”
Esme seemed frozen for a moment, and we all waited with baited breath.
Was this it? Would she finally leave us alone?
Instead of replying, the girl turned her attention away from Harry, and plonked herself down on Ariosa’s lap, chastising Wylan for wearing a short sleeved shirt.
Esme insisted on styling us, like we were dolls. She hated when Ariosa tied up her hair, and I wasn't allowed to straighten my curls. Harry had to wear contact lenses (if he wore glasses, she ignored him for days). When he lost his contacts and had to wear glasses, Esme bought him unlimited contacts.
Harry didn't respond to Esme ignoring him, instead cracking open another beer. He shot me a grin, which was a little too wide. Jesus fucking Christ, I remember thinking. He was losing his mind.
Mission accomplished.
If drunk Harry thought it was mission accomplished, Sober Harry was in for a rude awakening. The girl’s lack of response wasn't a win. It was a timebomb. Esme started talking about her own college acceptance letter, and I caught him glaring at her, his fingers pulverising the can. I hated what she was in the process of turning him into.
Wylan was staying quiet, absently making a mini sand castle, and Ariosa was snoozing on the sand.
The party was primarily to plan a quiet escape, and once AGAIN Esme had made it about her.
I excused myself, escaping down to the shallows.
The silence was a relief. I dropped onto my butt, letting the tide wash over my feet. Sticking my toes in bioluminescent plankton, I wondered how a candy bar had single handedly ruined my life.
Esme was making a fool out of herself again.
In the corner of my eye, she was standing with her hands on her hips, blonde curls being whipped around in the wind. Wylan had done something wrong. I had no idea what it was, though from the sound of her voice, it sounded like he'd been hiding a friend.
It was when I was watching the sea wash up on the sand, I heard it again.
Drilling.
It felt close, but also far away.
“We could just kill her, you know.”
Harry was standing behind me, swaying slightly, a fresh drink in his hand. He looked like a ghost under a moonlit sky, his cheeks were too pale, dark brown hair glued to his forehead with sweat.
He wasn't smiling. Esme said it was his best attribute, so he made sure to never smile around her. I took a moment to drink in how hollow the boy looked, both body and mind, his dark eyes barely focusing on me. Esme had turned him into a shell of himself. Not just Harry.
Ariosa had lost that glow to her skin, and I was sure Wylan was going grey at seventeen. Even looking at myself in the mirror, I was constantly on edge, my cheeks starting to deflate.
Turning back to the sea, I pressed my knees closer to my chest. The drilling was getting louder. It felt and sounded closer when I lowered my head, like if I turned at the right angle, I would hear it better. “You have a death wish, idiot.”
Harry snorted, slumping down next to me and resting his chin on his knees. He reached into his shorts and pulled out a cigarette, lit it up, and took a long drag.
The orange glow settled my dancing stomach. “I’m serious,” he said, lips curved around the cigarette. “We kill her, and dump her body in the sea. Then run the fuck away. Problem solved.”
“Problem still there,” I said pointedly, “You just declared war on a psychopath.”
I shoved him, and he pulled a face, shoving me back. “Since when do you smoke?”
Harry's gaze strayed on the ocean, smoke escaping his lips. “Since Ben.”
His words stung.
“Well, what about Esme’s dad?” I challenged him, changing the subject. I straightened up, stretching my legs. “We’ll have to kill him too, right?” I could see him trying not to smile around the smoke. So, I continued, eager to bring back the boy I grew up with. Even if it was just for one night.
“Psycho sponge?”
He groaned. “It was a good insult in my head.”
“It was a terrible insult! Did you see Wylan’s face?”
Harry laughed, and it was a good laugh, one that made me feel safe, despite knowing we were being watched. “We are going to leave here, don't worry,” He shot me a grin. “I told her to leave us alone, and…” Harry arched his neck, twisting around. “I think she got the memo? I hope she has, anyway…”
Nodding along, I took in Harry's words, though they were fading in and out.
I could hear that noise again.
It was real, a loud drilling in the back of my head. Looking up at the sky, it was suddenly too black, like an endless oblivion that would never brighten.
The sea lapping over my feet felt wrong, somehow.
Like it wasn't even wet.
The sand bunched between my fists was too perfect.
Perfect white sand, filtering through my fingers.
It was the kind of sand I dreamed of, unlike the actual beach which was mostly pointed rocks and spiky shells. It was too perfect. I looked around, gulping down air. Ariosa and Wylan trying to get the fire going, and Esme handing out food. The perfect night.
The stars twinkling above us.
The perfect sky.
“Harry.” my voice sounded wrong, like the words on my lips weren't mine.
He didn't look at me. “Yeah?”
“How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
Did I say that 5 times?
10?
15?
20?
The moon flickered, and went out completely.
And I fell through the sand, dragged down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
The drilling was louder, closer.
Real.
I could feel it, a blade pulverising through the back of my head, screeching blades dragging my thoughts to awareness. I could feel it seeping from me, blood dripping down my face and neck, pooling across the table I lay on. I opened my mouth to scream, but my lips were detached from me, my voice no longer mine.
Instead, my mind was suddenly in permanent rewind.
I was back on the beach, and this time Harry was smiling. His original words were torn away, that cutting blade slicing its way through my brain. “So here's what you're going to do,” his voice echoed, and he jumped up, picking Esme up and spinning her around. “You're going to stay with us. Forever. Never leave any of our sides.”
“You're a leech!”
“You're the most beautiful girl I've ever met. I want to be with you, Esme. Forever.”
I can't fucking take this anymore. She’s going to kill me.
This time, I did scream, a raw cry ripping from my throat.
I could sense bright light behind my eyes.
My wrists were strapped down, my head pinned to a cruel icy surface.
Harry's voice continued, clanging in my skull.
“I love her, Thea. I love her so much it hurts!”
It was endless.
It never stopped, and my screams died out into whimpers. They didn't even bother sedating me again. I felt everything, every cut and slice, the warmth that glued my hair to my face, and the saw that sheared all of it off.
When the white light faded, and flashing colours dotted my vision, I finally fell.
“Thea?”
When I opened my eyes, I was standing up.
No longer on the beach, I stood barefoot in front of an indoor swimming pool lit up in pale blue light.
I was so close to the edge, a white dress pooling at my feet, my hands wrapped around a bouquet of flowers.
I found myself smiling. Even when I reached a trembling hand to my head, where a veil had been forced into place. I stroked my fingers across my scalp, where old stitches had come apart, seeping red staining the collar of my dress and ruining my hair. When my fingers came back slick red, I swiftly wiped them on my dress, smiling wider.
Roses.
I clutched the bouquet tighter to my chest.
They were Esme’s favorite.
“Thea! Snap out of it!”
The man's voice startled me, reverberating through the room. I blinked, my vision swimming in and out of view. He was older than me, at least in his mid twenties, thick, brown hair hanging in dark eyes that part of me recognised. The flower crown of white roses sitting on top of his head looked like a joke, a mockery of him.
I didn't register the bloody sfrips of white wrapped around his head or the smear of red staining the front of his suit. Instead, I was choking on a name that shouldn't have matched the stranger.
No, not a stranger.
Harry Sullivan was not 25 years old.
Because if he was 25, then how old was I? I looked down at myself. I still felt seventeen, and yet I was taller, my dress perfectly fitted to my figure. I was seventeen, but my body was older, so much maturer, moulded and perfected.
No.
I felt my legs give-way, a cry rumbling in my throat.
I was going to go to college.
I was going to get away from her.
How long had I truly been sitting on the beach on the last day of senior year?
“Thea, listen to me.” his hands found mine, clammy and stained with blood, but his. It was him, and I wanted to cry, wanted to ask how he had jumped forwards in time, when I already knew the truth. I was in denial, and denial was agony. I moved to wrap my arms around my friend, but he shook his head.
“No, don't move,” he hissed out, “If you move, she'll know something is up.”
Opening my mouth, my throat tasted of rusty change.
How long? I wanted to scream, my chest aching.
Harry didn't speak. He didn't explain the strips of white wrapped around his head, or the others’ absence. He pressed something into my hand, delving it between the folds of my dress. The knife slid perfectly between my fingers, the blade pricking my skin.
I didn't feel anything. “Kill the bitch,” he said through gritted teeth. Harry didn't cry. I don't think he could cry anymore.
“Do you hear me?” he whispered, his voice collapsing into a sob. I wanted to know what had happened to him, what eight years had done to my best friend.
“Fucking kill her, Thea.”
The doors flew open, the sound of heels clicking loudly on marble.
Harry dropped to his knees, and I straightened up, fashioning my expression back to vacant. I wanted to help him. He couldn't stand up, his head bowed. If I was going to kill her, though, I had to catch her off guard.
Esme appeared, a blur of golden curls and fluffy pink. She was noticeably older too. Esme Lockhart was still beautiful, almost breathtakingly so. Her expression may have looked maturer, but that psychotic gleam was still there, twinkling in her eyes. “Harry,” her voice was more of a bird-like squawk.
I stayed frozen, watching the girl march over to him, entangling her arms around his waist. “You do realize it's bad luck for the groom to see his bride the night before.” Harry didn't fight back when she pulled out a silk cloth, wrapping it around his eyes, her hand slipping over his mouth. Esme’s lips found his ear, and I heard every word. This was the first time I'd heard her actually scared.
“Since you're insistent on ruining our perfect day, I want to give you your wedding present early.” Esme’s voice was silky smooth, sultry. She held him like a toy, rocking him side to side. Harry didn't move, crumpling in her arms. His frenzied eyes found mine.
Kill her.
“Come on,” she crooned, “Dad is waiting for you.”
I wanted to kill her right there, before she could drag my friend away.
But something snapped in my head, and I was back on the beach.
This time the tide was in, and I was sitting alone.
Behind me, Esme was the only one sitting by our fire.
“Thea!” she shouted, waving at me to join her.
The tide was at my feet, but I couldn't even feel it anymore.
There were no stars.
“Thea.”
Reality was being cruel to me.
It wouldn't let me sleep.
This time, I awoke under a beautiful blue sky.
Above me was a flower arch made of roses.
Rows of strangers with wide smiles sitting under trees entangled with lights.
Standing on my left was Ariosa. Her red hair was piled on her head, perfectly fitted with a flower crown. Her smile was too wide, intricately made up eyes half lidded, and I was sure she had wet herself through her wedding dress.
Ariosa wasn't really herself anymore, her gaze penetrating right through me.
I could see dark red smearing the top of her head.
Neither was Wylan, sculpted in a rich black suit. The boy was unrecognisable, hiding behind a mop of blonde curls, and a nose job I knew he didn't need. Wylan had grown up, maturing into a handsome man. But once I was staring at him, I couldn't stop. I glimpsed tell tale spots of blood staining his collar.
His grin was dazed, drool seeping down his chin. Wylan was standing at an angle, swaying back and forth, that glitter which was my best friend, gone.
“Thea!”
I blinked. Esme was inches away from me, the bride.
“Pay attention!”
I found myself nodding obediently.
In a few simple words, she was going to become my wife.
The knife was tucked into my dress.
Harry was standing next to me. I didn't want to look at him, because I knew what Esme’s wedding gift was. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a thin line of black trickling down his temple, scarlet bandages hidden under that hideous fucking flower crown.
His eyes were lazily following a butterfly, and he could barely stand still. Harry was the one who tried to get away, who clawed his way out of her control. Esme had decided to take his free will by force.
The others spoke their vows, like they had been cemented inside their minds.
“I…”
Harry Sullivan.
Ariosa Carlisle.
Wylan Sutton.
Thea Samuels.
“Take Esme Analise Lockhart to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until parted by death.”
“I…”
Harry blinked, his lips forming a smile.
“I… do.”
Ariosa giggled all the way through her speech, which was unintelligible.
Wylan sealed his vow, grinning through a mouthful of scarlet.
I think seeing him is what jerked my thoughts to fruition.
She had taken my friends, ripped away their youth, and now took their minds.
I think I said I do.
The wedding party exploded into cheering, and we were showered in confetti.
The officiator turned to me, and I saw bright, intense red.
Fuck. I don't even remember moving.
One second I was standing still, and the next, I was straddling my new wife, stabbing her straight through the throat.
I had to cut every order she had ever demanded of us directly from her mouth. Parted by death. The officiator’s words were ringing in my skull.
We were free.
She cut into my head and turned me into the perfect wife.
She turned my best friend's into mindless shells.
The wedding party was screaming, and so was I.
Help.
Blood was slick between my hands, but it felt good.
I need help.
There was no sign of my parents, anyone I knew. I didn't even see Esme’s father. I kicked off my heels and ran, and luckily, Ariosa thought it was a game, following me, grabbing Wylan.
Knowing that I would regret it if I left him, I pulled a barely responsive Harry along too, who awkwardly stumbled after me. We made it out of the hotel grounds, and I called the police, who immediately sent us to urgent care.
I spent two weeks in the emergency room, and I got two visitors. Emma, from high school. She hugged me, and so did her five year old girl. The second visitor was a surprise. Ben, Harry's old boyfriend who was now a cop, had been tracking us down since our “death” when we were seventeen. Apparently, Esme faked our deaths.
Ben told me my parents left town a year after my death. He had contacted them multiple times, but no reply.
They weren't interested.
Which was understandable.
If someone told me my dead daughter was in fact alive and forced to marry her best friend, I wouldn't engage either.
I asked Ben if he'd been to see Harry, and he nodded, his cheeks going pale.
He told me the words I didn't want to hear.
Harry wasn't Harry Sullivan anymore. The doctors explained it in more medical terms, a foreign object being obstructed through the skull and damaging the frontal lobe or something like that, I wasn't really listening. Ben started talking about serious damage to the brain, and I was on my knees on cool tiles, choking up my lunch. I knew exactly what it was.
Harry had been partially lobotomised, in a desperate attempt to subjugate him.
So, if my friends were lobotomised, what happened to me?
I was drilled through the head. I got the same treatment.
So, why was I awake and conscious, and they were braindead?
I've been living with Ben for the last two years.
Ari and Wylan have recovered, in a way.
I say in a way because I'm lying to myself.
They're completely different people. Wylan is erratic and acts like a child, and Ariosa repeatedly tells me how much she hates me.
Their lack of emotion scares me. The doctors are puzzled. They didn't think it was possible to make as much progress as they have, but Jason Song was also using technology that they had never seen Before. Ben argued that lobotomies don't control your mind, they destroy it. He was convinced something else was being used, which sent me to sleep for seven years, forcing my body into autopilot. It would explain Wylan and Ari’s behaviour too.
How they had somehow recovered, or sort of recovered from a lobotomy.
Harry spoke for the first time a few days ago.
I have a habit of visiting him when Ben isn't guarding his bed side.
I wasn't there when he spoke. I was buying soda when Ben stumbled out of the room, vomiting everywhere.
Unable to resist, I hurried inside.
Harry was sitting up, propped up on pillows.
His eyes were so much more alert, which gave me hope.
Until he opened his mouth.
Inclining his head, Harry frowned at me. Ariosa and Wylan have been looking behind me a lot. I thought they were staring into mid air, but Harry was staring at the exact same spot. Just behind my right shoulder. He spoke her name with a glitter in his eye, and I think in his mind, Harry could still see her.
And Esme was still the love of his –our– lives.
When I shut the door and sat down, his expression darkened.
I hate that I can see so much of her in him.
And it terrifies me.
Harry was looking behind me, craning his neck.
“Where did my wife go?”
I told him she was dead, only for him to laugh.
“No she's not,” Harry said, like a child acting out. “She was just right there!”
I know Esme can't be alive, but Ariosa and Wylan say the same thing.
That she's always standing right behind me.

I was seventeen years old when Harry Sullivan proposed we killed Esme.
And it was on our joint wedding day, eight years later, my hands slick with my wife's blood, when his words finally hit me.
There was a drilling sound in my head.
Sometimes it was loud.
Other times it was faint, barely noticeable.
But it was definitely there, getting closer and closer.
Louder.
I should have known not inviting Esme Lockhart to our party was a bad idea, but I was too tipsy to care. In my muddled mind, I would deal with the consequences later. Sitting on the beach with my knees pulled to my chest, a cool beer skimming my lips, I watched the tide ripple under my toes. The wind was trying to snatch the bottle from my hand, blowing my hair from my eyes.
Behind me, the party was in full swing, and Esme was being weird again.
Even through sharp blasts of wind trying to knock me over, I could hear her attempting to guilt trip Wylan for talking to a girl. It's not like I didn't expect it. Wylan had told me about the weird notes in his locker, the low-key threats in his mailbox to not even think about leaving for college.
I just didn't want to believe our best friend was this kind of obsessed with us.
If I’m honest, though, Esme was long passed obsession.
Infatuation.
This girl was a fucking psychopath.
Downing my beer, I revelled in the scratchy taste. I didn't even like it. But it was better than drinking straight vodka, which made you a psychopath.
Still though, the alcohol was perfect to lower my barriers and force words out of my mouth I had been choking on for years. I liked to think the stars aligned when we were little kids, and fate found us. Five seven year olds with our hands on the last candy bar. Pigtails, Four Eyes, Batman Shirt, Rich Girl, and Yellow Hat.
Initially, we fought for it. I snatched the candy bar up first, claiming finders keepers, only for Pigtails to grab it off of me, waving it in the air triumphantly, only for Four Eyes and Batman Shirt to form an allegiance, taking it for themselves. I shoved Batman Shirt, and he in turn pulled off my hat and made me cry. Rich Girl, who had been wandering around, stepped in.
We already knew who Rich Girl was. Her parents made more money than the Queen. At least, that’s what the rumour was in class. Rich Girl was rich rich, which meant she was either a celebrity, or a long lost princess.
In reality, her father, Jason Lockhart, had bought our little coastal town. Rich girl plucked the candy bar from the boys, and initiated a truce, splitting it four ways instead.
It was when she was handing out chunks of chocolate, did we share our names, grinning at each other with chocolatey mouths.
Pigtails was Ariosa.
Four Eyes, Harry.
Batman Shirt was Wylan.
Rich Girl, Esme.
And Yellow Hat was me.
The rest was history, I guess.
Following that day, the five of us became inseparable. In school, we became an unbreakable clique.
As littles, we made our own games and spent countless hours at the beach on weekends playing pirates. It was fun.
Those summer days and nights will be etched into my mind forever, a blur of swimming in the sea, eating candy, and sharing stories under a late setting sun.
Esme would regularly invite us to play at her house, which reminded me of a palace. She had seven bathrooms. Who needed seven bathrooms?
As littles, we made a pact. On the last day of summer vacation before third grade, we declared best friends forever.
Then, when we were twelve, tipsy on Esme’s father’s expensive wine and spread out on a picnic blanket, we said it again, giggling under a crescent moon.
Best friends forever.
It was when we reached high school, Esme started to take our pact a little too seriously.
I loved her as much as I loved the others.
But she didn't know boundaries.
Best friends forever was something a lot different in her mind.
It started subtly. When other kids wanted to hang out with us, she was adamant that it was just the five of us.
We were fourteen years old and in our freshman year of high school. Making new friends was inevitable. I invited two girls to sit with us at lunch, and Esme immediately stood up, dragging the boys and Ariosa to another table.
When I stood my ground and plonked down, refusing to follow them, Esme came over and politely asked me to join her and the others. By now, I was getting odd looks from other kids. Esme was a well-known name across town, and so was my name, by default.
I was already in way too deep with her family to brush her off. Esme’s father had already insisted on paying for my college tuition. I said no initially, though my mother thought it was a great idea.
Esme had a habit of throwing cash at us when she thought we were going to leave her.
Harry was promised a football scholarship when he showed signs of drifting away to hang out with the varsity team. When Wylan got a girlfriend, Esme surprised him with the guitar he had been saving up for.
Ariosa started getting cosy with a classmate, and that classmate’s parents suddenly won a lottery I had never heard of, and moved away. Initially, she isolated us from other kids, even our family, insisting on weekends away and trip’s to exotic locations. But we were growing up, and best friends forever was looking progressively less likely.
Esme thought our pact was an unbreakable bond, a need to be near each other constantly and be completely isolated from everyone else.
Esme thought best friends forever meant we couldn't fall in love, couldn't form relationships.
She didn't want us to grow up. In junior year, Harry actually went against her wishes and got a boyfriend. Harry Sullivan liked to experiment behind Esme’s back, having been on several dates with both guys and girls. It was well known that he was a player.
Even if Esme shot down those rumours. But I think he truly fell for Ben.
Opposites attract, and Harry, captain of the varsity team, falling for Ben Sykes, a quiet competitive swimmer, was the best thing that had happened to our group. Harry was slowly rebelling, which gave us the courage to fly the nest too. Initially, Esme didn't react or say anything.
In fact, she smiled when Harry awkwardly introduced us, his gaze glued to Esme. He was waiting for her to start screaming, his eyes hard, lips ready to argue. But she didn't. Esme offered Ben a seat. Wylan shot me a look, and Ariosa almost choked on her sandwich.
Harry didn't let his guard down, though. He politely declined her offer, and joined the varsity table instead. Harry Sullivan was slowly but surely moving away from us, away from best friends forever, and our stupid childhood pact.
He wanted his own life, his own friends. Ben was the start of that. Again, I was sure Esme was planning something.
She forced Wylan’s friends to move schools, and ripped Ariosa’s boyfriend out of town, so it didn't make sense to me why she was letting Harry get away with it.
She even restricted us from talking to adults, unless it was our parents.
Harry could have limited conversation with his coach (only in school time) and Wylan was only able to join the drama club if he promised to let the rest of us sit in the audience. If that wasn't weird enough, we were permitted to tell her everything. Every secret we had, or worry on our minds.
Obviously, we didn't.
There was no way I was telling her about my (late) first period, and I was pretty sure the boys would rather die than share their private lives.
Sometimes, we didn't have a choice. Esme would lock us in her car and demand every private detail, and it was less exhausting to just spill our guts.
I made the mistake of talking to a girl, Emma, at the start of the year. Esme may not have been in all of my classes, but she had spies, kids that were paid a decent sum of cash to make sure none of her friends were socialising.
Emma switched classes a day later, and when I tracked her down in the hallway, her eyes widened, like she was frightened.
Emma told me to stay away from her, so I did.
I didn't have a fucking choice.
I should have known the boy watching us gush over TV show crushes was loyal to Esme.
I thought she was okay with Harry dating someone. I mean, she didn't throw a screaming fit like usual.
Which was progress.
I was surprised she was actually allowing someone into the group.
Esme seemed genuinely happy with Harry's boyfriend joining our group, allowing him to come to hang out at her house, and our usual place on the beach.
The holidays came around, and Ariosa proposed a Christmas party at her place.
I was two hours late, after a heated argument with Mom over the car.
When I arrived, I immediately knew something was wrong. There was no music, and the lights were off. I did see an attempt at a party, grabbing myself some holiday themed punch from the lounge.
The figure sitting alone in the kitchen caught me off guard. It was pitch black, so I thought it was the ghost of Christmas past, after Esme forced us to watch Christmas movies with her a few days prior. When I clicked on the light, however, an identity swam into view.
Ben. Judging from the cans scattered on the table, he was maybe five or six drinks down. Harry's boyfriend regarded me with an almost pitiful smile. “Hey, Thea.” His voice was a kind of croak. Ben held up his can in a mocking salute. “Merry Christmas.”
“Hey.” I poured him a glass of water, sitting down hesitantly, my hands wrapped around a glass of punch. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh yeah, I'm great,” Ben’s sarcasm needed work. Harry was a master of irony, so maybe he was rubbing off on him. Ben downed another beer. “I missed a swim meet to come to this stupid party.”
Ouch.
Technically, it was an Esme centred party, so we were all there against our will.
I nodded, sipping my punch. It was kind of spicy. “So, where's everyone else?”
Ben met my gaze, his lips curling. “Where do you think?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Did they go out?”
I think Ben was waiting for me to give him a reason to find Harry. I couldn't give him one without going against her family, and putting myself in danger.
The boy scoffed. “Whatever, Thea,” he stood up. “Tell that bastard I never want to see him again,” he mumbled, staggering out of the kitchen.
Ben stopped in the doorway, but he didn't turn around. “You guys deserve each other,” he laughed, and something ice cold prickled its way down my spine. I didn't even wait for Ben to leave, and by the sound of it, he was already emptying his guts in the front hallway. Ignoring him, I forced my legs upstairs, my heart hammering.
There was no way, right?
Because if Esme had done this, then she had won.
The girl had a perfectly calculated plan after all.
Esme didn't want Harry to be intimate with anyone else but her.
I realised that when I stumbled into a lot of tangled legs and flushed faces under blankets. Wylan told me to turn off the light, but I was too stunned to move.
This wasn't what I expected. Esme wanted us as friends. But this was different. This was closer, more intimate, where she could have every part of us, body, mind, and soul. The logical side of my brain wondered if she had become so scared that we would find love and ruin our friendship pact, she immediately wanted us to love her instead.
While the not so alert part of my brain wanted to entangle myself in their weird foursome sandwich.
So, I joined them.
I mean, it was cold, the punch was definitely filled with aphrodisiacs to influence guests, and seeing Harry buried under Esme, his legs tangled around Ariosa, I'd say Esme’s plan had succeeded. I didn't want to know what Ben saw. Later on, I discovered that he walked in on them, and Harry, fully bewitched by Esme’s spell, ignored him. Ben was right. We did deserve each other. Esme had made sure of that.
I was feeling a little more than heated, so yeah, I crawled into bed with them.
I wanted to believe it meant something.
Even if I knew deep down, Esme was tightening her iron grip.
Ever since that night, our relationship became more intimate, which brought us closer together. But we never actually dated. Esme didn't want to date us, she just didn't want anyone else to date us. Most of my junior and senior year was a blur of blindly following orders, and watching the light slowly start to fizzle out in my friend’s eyes.
Esme demanded we move in with her, though luckily our parents stepped in.
When she started talking about friendship marriage, I think that was when we decided that we were done.
Best friends forever would never continue into college. I was sure of it.
Harry was the first to get a football scholarship.
Halfway across the country.
Esme did what she always did. She smiled through gritted teeth, congratulating him with a hug.
I caught Wylan’s Oh, fuck look, pretending to choke on his drink. We already knew she was planning something potentially life ruining.
We took bets.
Wylan was convinced her father would buy the college itself.
Ariosa went down a darker route, saying Esme would burn the campus to the ground.
Esme did neither, attempting manipulation more directly.
In the days following his announcement, Harry had received three anonymous death threats, and a stuffed rabbit filled with pigs blood thrown in his locker. When he talked to his parents, they went straight to the police, only to drop the case several hours later after a talk with her dad.
Harry said it was like his parents had been hypnotised.
Esme turned the whole town against us, so we had no choice but to run back to her.
Wylan talked to a girl during gym, and one of Esme’s spies immediately reported it.
I accidentally smiled at Josh Pieck in AP English, and received a strongly worded email to not even look at him.
Senior year drew to a close, and our only solace was a stupid party on the beach. I made sure to only invite kids who either hated Esme, or had offered us their help in the past. They were too scared to turn up. Emily Littlewood said her family could get us fake IDs and out of town. She sent Ariosa a text from an unknown number, only disclosing her name in cryptic code.
Emily's parents were in a car crash hours later.
Anyone who tried to help us were either hurt, or cut out of the picture.
We were officially on our own.
Presently, I felt sick to my stomach. I got an email from a college I didn't even apply to, congratulating me on my acceptance. The college just so happened to be the one Wylan and Ariosa were accepted into, and of course, Harry was going there too.
The letter was stuffed in my pocket, and I was planning on burning it. It was my way of breaking this stupid pact.
We were not going to be best friends forever, because in Esme’s eyes, she didn't see the four of us friends.
Esme saw us as trophies. Pretty things she could call hers.
Fuck that.
We built a fire on the beach. Harry pulled out his acceptance letter first, and in our own private ceremony, we took turns throwing them into the flames. I wanted to laugh in relief, but I was too scared to laugh, too scared to smile, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if we were being watched.
I started to let my guard down, slumping on the sand to eat charred marshmallows and talk shit, when Esme herself turned up with a crate of beers.
Wylan shot me a death glare, because I was usually the one who accidentally exposed our location.
But I had been so careful.
Ariosa immediately stiffened up, and Harry rolled his eyes, draining the rest of his beer. I think he was expecting it.
We had all mutually agreed that Esme and her family were witches.
Ariosa’s expression twisted with genuine fright, and she panicked, plucking the smouldered remains of our letters from the fire and stuffing them in her backpack. I was sure she burned herself from the way she kept wafting her hand, wrapping her fingers around an icy beer, though she was more scared of getting caught trashing Esme’s gift.
Luckily, Esme didn't notice, excusing herself for being late.
Harry was uncharacteristically snappy, leaning forward in his chair. The boy wasn't even trying to hide his disdain for her. Two days before, he broke down in my car. It was the only place without a camera, without spies hanging around.
Wylan was sleeping in the back, and Ariosa was dozing in his lap. Harry kept it together until I asked him if he was okay, and his body kind of jerked, like he was trembling. He had spent the whole car ride staring into oblivion, his eyes half lidded, lips curled into an almost maniacal smile.
I didn't notice he was clinging onto his seat for dear life, like Esme was going to pop up out of nowhere. I can't do this anymore. He kept saying it again and again and again, until his fingers were clawing at his hair, and he was screaming, his eyes almost feral, like a wild animal. I can't fucking do this anymore, she's going to kill me.
I hugged him. It was all I could do.
Just a few more weeks, I told him.
Then we would be free.
“How did you know we were here?” Harry's eyes narrowed, lips curling. “Are you stalking us, Esme?”
His tone was like warm water washing over me.
I thought it might finally push her away.
Esme shot him a grin. “I always know where you are,” she said, ruffling his hair. “I was just making last minute arrangements for something special.”
Harry wasn't playing around, scoffing through another mouthful of beer.
“And what's that?” he mumbled under his breath. “Another death threat?”
Esme seemed to notice his disobedience, though she didn't say anything, maintaining her wide smile.
“That's a secret.”
Harry sat back in his chair, nursing another beer. Wylan nudged him to stop drinking, but he protested with a groan, slurping from the can.
“I'm sick of being ordered around,” he said, downing another beer, as if in protest. “I'm going to do whatever I fucking want,” his half lidded gaze fell on Esme, who had visibly stiffened up. “You do whatever the fuck you want, and I'll do whatever the fuck I want.” he saluted her with his drink. “All right?”
When Esme didn't respond, Harry threw his empty can at her.
The girl didn't even flinch.
“I'm going to Duke, you psycho sponge,” Harry spat, and I caught Wylan’s wry smile. Ariosa’s expression brightened. Duke was always his first choice.
“I don't want to go to your fucking college, Esme. I don't want to be anywhere near you or your family. You're a leech. You leech onto people and suck the life out of them, and… and then throw money at them when they want to leave! What you're doing is borderline psycho. You take everything away from us. When we find friends, you make them disappear, and when we find someone, you throw yourself at us! Like a leech!”
Gulping down beer, he was just getting started.
“That night with Ben,” Harry choked out, “You fucked with our heads.”
He spluttered on a sob, and Ari moved to grab his hand, but he shoved her away, his lips curling into a snarl, angrily swiping at his eyes.
“No, get off of me, it needs to be said!” his gaze flicked back to Esme.
“You turned my parents into mindless followers of yours so you could keep me under your control. You manipulate us with money and vacations, and fancy scholarships. I mean, who fucking does that, huh? What kind of person goes to these kinds of lengths to keep friends?” he laughed.
“You threaten and isolate us, and seriously think we want to be friends?”
Harry let out a shuddery breath.
“So, here's what you're going to do. You're going to leave me and my parents alone. The same goes for Ari, Thea, and Wylan. You're going to get your father to fire my parents, and then you're going to get your ‘connections’ you keep bragging about to cancel the scholarship I don't even want. If you don't, I'll happily contact the police, and get your ass thrown in jail for stalking.”
His smile was harsh, almost manic, when Esme opened her mouth. Harry tipped his head back, dazedly blinking at the sky. “Not the police under your dad’s thumb,” he said with a snort. “I’m not fucking stupid. I mean outside of town, where you'll face actual consequences.” his eyes darkened.
“After tonight, I don't want to see your face again.” His words were venomous, and I revelled in each one. “Find new friends in college, Esme, and pray that they tolerate your psycho bullshit…”
Harry's voice faded out, the sea suddenly so much louder in my ears, waves crashing onto the sand, before drifting back. “...And don't put you six feet under the fuckin’ ground.”
Esme seemed frozen for a moment, and we all waited with baited breath.
Was this it? Would she finally leave us alone?
Instead of replying, the girl turned her attention away from Harry, and plonked herself down on Ariosa’s lap, chastising Wylan for wearing a short sleeved shirt.
Esme insisted on styling us, like we were dolls. She hated when Ariosa tied up her hair, and I wasn't allowed to straighten my curls. Harry had to wear contact lenses (if he wore glasses, she ignored him for days). When he lost his contacts and had to wear glasses, Esme bought him unlimited contacts.
Harry didn't respond to Esme ignoring him, instead cracking open another beer. He shot me a grin, which was a little too wide. Jesus fucking Christ, I remember thinking. He was losing his mind.
Mission accomplished.
If drunk Harry thought it was mission accomplished, Sober Harry was in for a rude awakening. The girl’s lack of response wasn't a win. It was a timebomb. Esme started talking about her own college acceptance letter, and I caught him glaring at her, his fingers pulverising the can. I hated what she was in the process of turning him into.
Wylan was staying quiet, absently making a mini sand castle, and Ariosa was snoozing on the sand.
The party was primarily to plan a quiet escape, and once AGAIN Esme had made it about her.
I excused myself, escaping down to the shallows.
The silence was a relief. I dropped onto my butt, letting the tide wash over my feet. Sticking my toes in bioluminescent plankton, I wondered how a candy bar had single handedly ruined my life.
Esme was making a fool out of herself again.
In the corner of my eye, she was standing with her hands on her hips, blonde curls being whipped around in the wind. Wylan had done something wrong. I had no idea what it was, though from the sound of her voice, it sounded like he'd been hiding a friend.
It was when I was watching the sea wash up on the sand, I heard it again.
Drilling.
It felt close, but also far away.
“We could just kill her, you know.”
Harry was standing behind me, swaying slightly, a fresh drink in his hand. He looked like a ghost under a moonlit sky, his cheeks were too pale, dark brown hair glued to his forehead with sweat.
He wasn't smiling. Esme said it was his best attribute, so he made sure to never smile around her. I took a moment to drink in how hollow the boy looked, both body and mind, his dark eyes barely focusing on me. Esme had turned him into a shell of himself. Not just Harry.
Ariosa had lost that glow to her skin, and I was sure Wylan was going grey at seventeen. Even looking at myself in the mirror, I was constantly on edge, my cheeks starting to deflate.
Turning back to the sea, I pressed my knees closer to my chest. The drilling was getting louder. It felt and sounded closer when I lowered my head, like if I turned at the right angle, I would hear it better. “You have a death wish, idiot.”
Harry snorted, slumping down next to me and resting his chin on his knees. He reached into his shorts and pulled out a cigarette, lit it up, and took a long drag.
The orange glow settled my dancing stomach. “I’m serious,” he said, lips curved around the cigarette. “We kill her, and dump her body in the sea. Then run the fuck away. Problem solved.”
“Problem still there,” I said pointedly, “You just declared war on a psychopath.”
I shoved him, and he pulled a face, shoving me back. “Since when do you smoke?”
Harry's gaze strayed on the ocean, smoke escaping his lips. “Since Ben.”
His words stung.
“Well, what about Esme’s dad?” I challenged him, changing the subject. I straightened up, stretching my legs. “We’ll have to kill him too, right?” I could see him trying not to smile around the smoke. So, I continued, eager to bring back the boy I grew up with. Even if it was just for one night.
“Psycho sponge?”
He groaned. “It was a good insult in my head.”
“It was a terrible insult! Did you see Wylan’s face?”
Harry laughed, and it was a good laugh, one that made me feel safe, despite knowing we were being watched. “We are going to leave here, don't worry,” He shot me a grin. “I told her to leave us alone, and…” Harry arched his neck, twisting around. “I think she got the memo? I hope she has, anyway…”
Nodding along, I took in Harry's words, though they were fading in and out.
I could hear that noise again.
It was real, a loud drilling in the back of my head. Looking up at the sky, it was suddenly too black, like an endless oblivion that would never brighten.
The sea lapping over my feet felt wrong, somehow.
Like it wasn't even wet.
The sand bunched between my fists was too perfect.
Perfect white sand, filtering through my fingers.
It was the kind of sand I dreamed of, unlike the actual beach which was mostly pointed rocks and spiky shells. It was too perfect. I looked around, gulping down air. Ariosa and Wylan trying to get the fire going, and Esme handing out food. The perfect night.
The stars twinkling above us.
The perfect sky.
“Harry.” my voice sounded wrong, like the words on my lips weren't mine.
He didn't look at me. “Yeah?”
“How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
How many times have we had this conversation?”
Did I say that 5 times?
10?
15?
20?
The moon flickered, and went out completely.
And I fell through the sand, dragged down.
Down.
Down.
Down.
The drilling was louder, closer.
Real.
I could feel it, a blade pulverising through the back of my head, screeching blades dragging my thoughts to awareness. I could feel it seeping from me, blood dripping down my face and neck, pooling across the table I lay on. I opened my mouth to scream, but my lips were detached from me, my voice no longer mine.
Instead, my mind was suddenly in permanent rewind.
I was back on the beach, and this time Harry was smiling. His original words were torn away, that cutting blade slicing its way through my brain. “So here's what you're going to do,” his voice echoed, and he jumped up, picking Esme up and spinning her around. “You're going to stay with us. Forever. Never leave any of our sides.”
“You're a leech!”
“You're the most beautiful girl I've ever met. I want to be with you, Esme. Forever.”
I can't fucking take this anymore. She’s going to kill me.
This time, I did scream, a raw cry ripping from my throat.
I could sense bright light behind my eyes.
My wrists were strapped down, my head pinned to a cruel icy surface.
Harry's voice continued, clanging in my skull.
“I love her, Thea. I love her so much it hurts!”
It was endless.
It never stopped, and my screams died out into whimpers. They didn't even bother sedating me again. I felt everything, every cut and slice, the warmth that glued my hair to my face, and the saw that sheared all of it off.
When the white light faded, and flashing colours dotted my vision, I finally fell.
“Thea?”
When I opened my eyes, I was standing up.
No longer on the beach, I stood barefoot in front of an indoor swimming pool lit up in pale blue light.
I was so close to the edge, a white dress pooling at my feet, my hands wrapped around a bouquet of flowers.
I found myself smiling. Even when I reached a trembling hand to my head, where a veil had been forced into place. I stroked my fingers across my scalp, where old stitches had come apart, seeping red staining the collar of my dress and ruining my hair. When my fingers came back slick red, I swiftly wiped them on my dress, smiling wider.
Roses.
I clutched the bouquet tighter to my chest.
They were Esme’s favorite.
“Thea! Snap out of it!”
The man's voice startled me, reverberating through the room. I blinked, my vision swimming in and out of view. He was older than me, at least in his mid twenties, thick, brown hair hanging in dark eyes that part of me recognised. The flower crown of white roses sitting on top of his head looked like a joke, a mockery of him.
I didn't register the bloody sfrips of white wrapped around his head or the smear of red staining the front of his suit. Instead, I was choking on a name that shouldn't have matched the stranger.
No, not a stranger.
Harry Sullivan was not 25 years old.
Because if he was 25, then how old was I? I looked down at myself. I still felt seventeen, and yet I was taller, my dress perfectly fitted to my figure. I was seventeen, but my body was older, so much maturer, moulded and perfected.
No.
I felt my legs give-way, a cry rumbling in my throat.
I was going to go to college.
I was going to get away from her.
How long had I truly been sitting on the beach on the last day of senior year?
“Thea, listen to me.” his hands found mine, clammy and stained with blood, but his. It was him, and I wanted to cry, wanted to ask how he had jumped forwards in time, when I already knew the truth. I was in denial, and denial was agony. I moved to wrap my arms around my friend, but he shook his head.
“No, don't move,” he hissed out, “If you move, she'll know something is up.”
Opening my mouth, my throat tasted of rusty change.
How long? I wanted to scream, my chest aching.
Harry didn't speak. He didn't explain the strips of white wrapped around his head, or the others’ absence. He pressed something into my hand, delving it between the folds of my dress. The knife slid perfectly between my fingers, the blade pricking my skin.
I didn't feel anything. “Kill the bitch,” he said through gritted teeth. Harry didn't cry. I don't think he could cry anymore.
“Do you hear me?” he whispered, his voice collapsing into a sob. I wanted to know what had happened to him, what eight years had done to my best friend.
“Fucking kill her, Thea.”
The doors flew open, the sound of heels clicking loudly on marble.
Harry dropped to his knees, and I straightened up, fashioning my expression back to vacant. I wanted to help him. He couldn't stand up, his head bowed. If I was going to kill her, though, I had to catch her off guard.
Esme appeared, a blur of golden curls and fluffy pink. She was noticeably older too. Esme Lockhart was still beautiful, almost breathtakingly so. Her expression may have looked maturer, but that psychotic gleam was still there, twinkling in her eyes. “Harry,” her voice was more of a bird-like squawk.
I stayed frozen, watching the girl march over to him, entangling her arms around his waist. “You do realize it's bad luck for the groom to see his bride the night before.” Harry didn't fight back when she pulled out a silk cloth, wrapping it around his eyes, her hand slipping over his mouth. Esme’s lips found his ear, and I heard every word. This was the first time I'd heard her actually scared.
“Since you're insistent on ruining our perfect day, I want to give you your wedding present early.” Esme’s voice was silky smooth, sultry. She held him like a toy, rocking him side to side. Harry didn't move, crumpling in her arms. His frenzied eyes found mine.
Kill her.
“Come on,” she crooned, “Dad is waiting for you.”
I wanted to kill her right there, before she could drag my friend away.
But something snapped in my head, and I was back on the beach.
This time the tide was in, and I was sitting alone.
Behind me, Esme was the only one sitting by our fire.
“Thea!” she shouted, waving at me to join her.
The tide was at my feet, but I couldn't even feel it anymore.
There were no stars.
“Thea.”
Reality was being cruel to me.
It wouldn't let me sleep.
This time, I awoke under a beautiful blue sky.
Above me was a flower arch made of roses.
Rows of strangers with wide smiles sitting under trees entangled with lights.
Standing on my left was Ariosa. Her red hair was piled on her head, perfectly fitted with a flower crown. Her smile was too wide, intricately made up eyes half lidded, and I was sure she had wet herself through her wedding dress.
Ariosa wasn't really herself anymore, her gaze penetrating right through me.
I could see dark red smearing the top of her head.
Neither was Wylan, sculpted in a rich black suit. The boy was unrecognisable, hiding behind a mop of blonde curls, and a nose job I knew he didn't need. Wylan had grown up, maturing into a handsome man. But once I was staring at him, I couldn't stop. I glimpsed tell tale spots of blood staining his collar.
His grin was dazed, drool seeping down his chin. Wylan was standing at an angle, swaying back and forth, that glitter which was my best friend, gone.
“Thea!”
I blinked. Esme was inches away from me, the bride.
“Pay attention!”
I found myself nodding obediently.
In a few simple words, she was going to become my wife.
The knife was tucked into my dress.
Harry was standing next to me. I didn't want to look at him, because I knew what Esme’s wedding gift was. In the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a thin line of black trickling down his temple, scarlet bandages hidden under that hideous fucking flower crown.
His eyes were lazily following a butterfly, and he could barely stand still. Harry was the one who tried to get away, who clawed his way out of her control. Esme had decided to take his free will by force.
The others spoke their vows, like they had been cemented inside their minds.
“I…”
Harry Sullivan.
Ariosa Carlisle.
Wylan Sutton.
Thea Samuels.
“Take Esme Analise Lockhart to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until parted by death.”
“I…”
Harry blinked, his lips forming a smile.
“I… do.”
Ariosa giggled all the way through her speech, which was unintelligible.
Wylan sealed his vow, grinning through a mouthful of scarlet.
I think seeing him is what jerked my thoughts to fruition.
She had taken my friends, ripped away their youth, and now took their minds.
I think I said I do.
The wedding party exploded into cheering, and we were showered in confetti.
The officiator turned to me, and I saw bright, intense red.
Fuck. I don't even remember moving.
One second I was standing still, and the next, I was straddling my new wife, stabbing her straight through the throat.
I had to cut every order she had ever demanded of us directly from her mouth. Parted by death. The officiator’s words were ringing in my skull.
We were free.
She cut into my head and turned me into the perfect wife.
She turned my best friend's into mindless shells.
The wedding party was screaming, and so was I.
Help.
Blood was slick between my hands, but it felt good.
I need help.
There was no sign of my parents, anyone I knew. I didn't even see Esme’s father. I kicked off my heels and ran, and luckily, Ariosa thought it was a game, following me, grabbing Wylan.
Knowing that I would regret it if I left him, I pulled a barely responsive Harry along too, who awkwardly stumbled after me. We made it out of the hotel grounds, and I called the police, who immediately sent us to urgent care.
I spent two weeks in the emergency room, and I got two visitors. Emma, from high school. She hugged me, and so did her five year old girl. The second visitor was a surprise. Ben, Harry's old boyfriend who was now a cop, had been tracking us down since our “death” when we were seventeen. Apparently, Esme faked our deaths.
Ben told me my parents left town a year after my death. He had contacted them multiple times, but no reply.
They weren't interested.
Which was understandable.
If someone told me my dead daughter was in fact alive and forced to marry her best friend, I wouldn't engage either.
I asked Ben if he'd been to see Harry, and he nodded, his cheeks going pale.
He told me the words I didn't want to hear.
Harry wasn't Harry Sullivan anymore. The doctors explained it in more medical terms, a foreign object being obstructed through the skull and damaging the frontal lobe or something like that, I wasn't really listening. Ben started talking about serious damage to the brain, and I was on my knees on cool tiles, choking up my lunch. I knew exactly what it was.
Harry had been partially lobotomised, in a desperate attempt to subjugate him.
So, if my friends were lobotomised, what happened to me?
I was drilled through the head. I got the same treatment.
So, why was I awake and conscious, and they were braindead?
I've been living with Ben for the last two years.
Ari and Wylan have recovered, in a way.
I say in a way because I'm lying to myself.
They're completely different people. Wylan is erratic and acts like a child, and Ariosa repeatedly tells me how much she hates me.
Their lack of emotion scares me. The doctors are puzzled. They didn't think it was possible to make as much progress as they have, but Jason Song was also using technology that they had never seen Before. Ben argued that lobotomies don't control your mind, they destroy it. He was convinced something else was being used, which sent me to sleep for seven years, forcing my body into autopilot. It would explain Wylan and Ari’s behaviour too.
How they had somehow recovered, or sort of recovered from a lobotomy.
Harry spoke for the first time a few days ago.
I have a habit of visiting him when Ben isn't guarding his bed side.
I wasn't there when he spoke. I was buying soda when Ben stumbled out of the room, vomiting everywhere.
Unable to resist, I hurried inside.
Harry was sitting up, propped up on pillows.
His eyes were so much more alert, which gave me hope.
Until he opened his mouth.
Inclining his head, Harry frowned at me. Ariosa and Wylan have been looking behind me a lot. I thought they were staring into mid air, but Harry was staring at the exact same spot. Just behind my right shoulder. He spoke her name with a glitter in his eye, and I think in his mind, Harry could still see her.
And Esme was still the love of his –our– lives.
When I shut the door and sat down, his expression darkened.
I hate that I can see so much of her in him.
And it terrifies me.
Harry was looking behind me, craning his neck.
“Where did my wife go?”
I told him she was dead, only for him to laugh.
“No she's not,” Harry said, like a child acting out. “She was just right there!”
I know Esme can't be alive, but Ariosa and Wylan say the same thing.
That she's always standing right behind me.

Life in my house had started to become twisted a few months ago. The amount of strange and psychotic incidents I had dealt with seemed to grow by the day.
My six-year-old daughter, Brandi, used to be a heavy sleeper before all this started. She would fall asleep on the couch while watching TV, and I would often end up carrying her to her bed. But lately, she never slept. Every time I woke up in the master bedroom, I would catch a glimpse of a small face peeking around the door, silently disappearing into the shadows of the house, unrestrained glee on her small face.
My wife had the most severe personality changes of all. She wasn’t the woman I had married. All of her warmth, compassion and humanity had suddenly disappeared, leaving some monstrous shell behind. Like my daughter, she never seemed to sleep anymore. She would disappear into the dark forest behind the house at night, wandering in her nightgown, barefoot, like a pale ghost disappearing into the mist.
One night, I remember waking up from a nightmare. The bathroom light dimly illuminated the master bedroom where I slept. I turned to my wife, and found her already awake- staring at me with an insane expression, her eyes bulging out of their sockets, a wide, lunatic grin spread across her face. I sat straight up in bed, my heart palpitating with fear.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, but she continued to stare at me with that inhuman expression, her eyes gleaming. “Emma? Are you OK?” I felt something wet and sticky soaking into my T-shirt. I looked down on the bed, and saw a freshly dead possum laying between us, its head twisted around, its torso sliced down the middle. Intestines spilled out onto the sheets, staining them. The smell of blood and death hit me all at once, and I jumped out of bed without another word, grabbing new clothes and running to the bathroom.
I locked myself in, hyperventilating for a few moments. Then I managed to calm myself down. I checked the lock again, then I stripped naked and took a long shower, wiping the blood off my skin over and over. No matter how much soap I used, I still felt stained.
When I was done, I opened the door a tiny crack and peered through. The bedroom looked empty. I had no idea where my wife was, and I didn’t care. I quickly ran to the guest bedroom, locking the door behind me. And, for the last couple months, I’ve slept there every night- a can of police mace on the nightstand next to the bed, a brand-new deadbolt on the door.
***
The next morning, I met my friend Richie at a local diner. I had called out sick from work, and as I sat in the booth waiting for him to arrive, my hands shook uncontrollably. I spilled coffee on the table and on myself more than a few times. I hadn’t slept since the incident, and was only running on a couple hours.
I saw Richie arrive, striding through the front door. He wore a T-shirt to show off the tattoos on his arms. With his dirty-blonde hair and blue eyes, he had a very Irish cast to his face.
He sat down across from me, looking me up and down quickly and frowning slightly. He saw all of the spill marks on the table, the napkins I had used to do a half-assed job of cleaning it up, my trembling hands and sunken, tired eyes. I’m sure I was quite a sight.
“What’s up, Thorne?” he asked simply, not smiling. Like a lot of my friends, he always called me by my last name, rather than by Julius. I shook my head.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “Some weird shit has been going on. Like, really weird. I’m scared, man. I really am.” He nodded.
“Yeah, I can tell,” he said. “You know I’m always here for you. Whatever you need, just call.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to smile slightly.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” he said. “I’m all ears. Tell me everything, and maybe we can figure out something.”
At that moment, the waitress came, taking our orders and bringing Richie some coffee. Once she had gone, I told him everything that had happened. I didn’t leave out a single detail. By the time I was done, our breakfast had arrived and we were both on our third cups of coffee. I still felt drained, however. The caffeine seemed to make me feel more tired, if anything.
“Hmmm,” Richie said thoughtfully, eating a piece of bacon off his plate. He stared across the room, his eyes looking a thousand miles away, deep in thought. “That is weird.”
“I think it’s more than weird,” I said. “It’s fucking psychotic. I’m scared to go home. I’m scared to be in the same room with my own wife and daughter.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding, chugging the rest of his burning hot coffee in one long swallow. “It is. Psychotic, I mean. What do you think is happening?” The question caught me by surprise. I choked on my coffee, coughing.
“Me?” I asked. “I have no goddamned idea what’s happening. All I know is my wife and daughter have turned into lunatics. If it was just one of them acting weird, maybe I’d think it was mental illness, schizophrenia or something…” He smiled slightly at that, but his eyes remained grave. I think the seriousness with which he took the situation freaked me out nearly as much as the situation itself.
“But it’s not one. It’s both,” he pointed out. “And yet, not you. You seem totally fine.”
“So what’s your point?” I asked.
“Well, if it was some sort of strange drug in the water, all three of you should be affected. You all eat and drink the same stuff, right?” I nodded. “And if it was mental illness, likely it would only be one of your family members affected. I mean, what are the chances that two people would develop a serious psychotic disorder at the exact same time? And schizophrenia is extremely rare in children anyways.”
“So what does that leave?” I asked. He shrugged.
“I don’t know, maybe body-snatchers, aliens, mad scientists cloning people in secret government experiments. Who the hell knows?” I laughed at that. Hearing it put into words made it sound totally insane.
“Aliens? Body-snatchers?” I said, scoffing. “That’s all science-fiction crap. This is real, man. It’s real and I don’t know what to do.”
“You should leave your house immediately. You can come stay with me for a few days,” Richie said. I shook my head.
“I can’t just leave my family behind,” I said, realizing how feeble the argument sounded. I had just said these people weren’t my family, after all. But Richie understood.
“You mean you can’t leave until you find out what might have happened?” he asked. My head slumped, all the tiredness and fear from the past weeks leaving me lethargic and bone-tired.
“I just can’t leave,” I said again, feeling like a prisoner.
***
Things began to get stranger after that. Pets began to disappear. All across the neighborhood, I would see signs for missing dogs and cats. Normally, Emma would have become despondent over this. She was an animal-lover who often donated to charities for homeless or abandoned pets. She had an ASPCA sticker on her car. But, as I knew early on in my heart, it was not Emma I was living with anymore.
During the first days, I thought perhaps some toxin in the food or water had caused brain damage and personality changes in my family. Maybe it was an intentional release of some chemical weapons agent by the government or a terrorist organization. All of these thoughts passed through my head, but my intuition told me over and over that they were all dead-ends or red herrings. The truth was, these people were not my family. I knew it in my heart from the very beginning.
I could see it in the way their eyes gleamed during the night as they crept around the house, never sleeping, moving as silently as cats stalking their prey. I would hear floorboards creak outside the door as one or maybe both of them stood there for hours on end in the middle of the night, and my heart would begin beating fast. Dark bags began to form under my eyes as I slept less and less.
The only release I had was work, but every night, I would have to come back to these people who I didn’t know, but who looked identical to my family. I lost weight from the stress, and I began to smoke heavily. Normally, Emma hated it when I smoked, and she never allowed smoking in the house. Now, I chain-smoked inside and she didn’t even seem to notice. She and Brandi barely talked anymore, even to each other. When they did speak, their sentences were short, clipped and often bizarre.
A month ago, I was sitting up in the guest bed, smoking and reading some Philip K Dick. I had “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” in my hands, which, ironically, was a story about a man who had been replaced by an advanced alien civilization. It struck too close to home, and I put the book down, just staring out the window, the dim lamp I kept on through the night giving the room a yellow glow. And then I saw her.
My wife was creeping out the basement door, barefoot, an insane smile plastered across her face. Her wide eyes looked around. She looked like a maniac who was trying to keep herself from descending into uncontrollable laughter.
“I wonder what they find so amusing,” I whispered to myself bitterly, feeling cold hatred and spite towards these two strange people who had taken over my house.
I saw her start towards the woods behind the house, taking a small dirt trail that ran towards a nature reserve a mile away. And at that moment, totally fed up and ready for this madness to end, I resolved to follow her. I got up out of bed, wincing as the springs groaned. I wondered if my daughter would be waiting outside the door with a bloody knife in her hands, ready to cut me open like my wife did to that poor possum.
I heard a floorboard creak directly outside my door, and a slight, barely audible sound followed it. It sounded like giggling, a little girl quietly laughing. I swore under my breath.
“Fuck it,” I whispered, going to the window and opening it. The wood shrieked loudly, and I winced, looking back over at the door. But I heard no response from the other side.
“You’re afraid of a little girl finding out you’re leaving? A grown man?” I asked myself, smiling at the absurdity of it. But when I remembered Brandi’s cold, insane eyes, the smile went away. Yes, indeed, I was afraid of that little girl. I had no idea what she was capable of.
I looked down. I was only on the second story, and below the window was soft earth and grass. I slowly climbed out, hanging myself down from the window and letting myself drop.
I felt myself falling for a few moments, and I wondered if I would regret this. Images of my leg bone breaking and poking out through the skin ran through my head, and then I hit the ground, rolling as I hit dirt. I landed hard on my back, knocking the wind out of my lungs. I lay there for a few seconds, breathing hard, then pushed myself up and began following my wife, wearing only slippers and boxers and a T-shirt. I wasn’t exactly dressed for reconnaissance work. Then again, neither was she.
I glanced at the house, and from my daughter’s window, I thought I saw a small face staring down at me- grinning like a jack-o-lantern, an expression of barely contained glee and bloodlust marring her childish face. But when I looked back up, the window was empty. I figured my mind must be playing tricks on me, and yet it shook me badly. I had never imagined I could be so afraid of a little girl as I was right then.
I tried to move as fast as I could without making noise, hoping I could catch up with my wife. The half-moon gave some bare light that streamed through the trees. I used it to avoid the rocks and tree roots that jutted up out of the earth.
After a few minutes, I heard an eerie sound coming from in front of me. Humming. I caught a glimpse of my wife, pale and white, her nightgown billowing around her thin frame. She stared straight ahead, her eyes not seeming to blink. She veered off the trail, and I followed from a safe distance, trying to keep myself hidden behind trees. It felt like dozens of eyes watched my every movement, but I brushed it off as paranoia.
She trampled through brush and pricker bushes, not seeming to notice the thorns and whipping branches. I tried to avoid the obstacles while still keeping her in view. We went uphill for a while, and to me, her choice of direction seemed totally random.
Then, she stopped. The humming cut off in mid-note, and she knelt down, sighing in pleasure.
She began to play with something white laying on the ground under a small pile of leaves and brush. She carefully brushed the remnants of disintegrating leaves and soil off the object. From behind the tree, I couldn’t see what it was.
She ran it through her fingers, stroking it lovingly, even kissing it. After what felt like an eternity, she put it back down, turning around to start back towards the house. She passed within twenty feet of me. I hid behind the largest tree in the immediate area, moving behind the trunk as she passed, praying no twigs would snap and give away my presence.
None did, and I watched her descend into the fog and the trees. As soon as I was sure she was gone, I crept forwards towards the spot I had seen Emma crouching.
A bone lay there, thin and long, still covered in small pieces of rotting flesh. In horror, I knelt down, examining it closer. It looked too large to be an animal bone, though perhaps it could have come from a deer.
Underneath, I saw the earth had recently been disturbed. It looked as if it had been dug up and filled back in. I went back to the house and grabbed a shovel from the shed, determined to solve this mystery. The dark house loomed over me, the windows looking down on me like pupils, hiding what laid behind them.
When I got back to the site of the bone, I started digging. The earth was soft and fresh, and it didn’t take long to get a large hole started. But I found nothing for the first half-hour. Covered in sweat and breathing heavily, I took a break, then returned to the task.
Once I had gotten down about five feet, I saw something besides dirt and small stones. At first, I couldn’t tell what it was, but it emanated a fluorescent, day-glo color. Then, with horror, I realized it was my daughter’s favorite T-shirt.
I kept pulling dirt off, and soon found two bodies in the pit. It was Emma and Brandi, their throats cut wide open, their staring eyes covered in dirt.
I turned and vomited on the forest floor, feeling I might collapse at any moment. Waves of hopelessness, confusion and anger consumed me in turn. Staggering, I ran out of the woods, going to a neighbor’s house and frantically knocking on the door. It was 3 AM, and it took a while to get a response. Finally, my neighbor, an old retired man, came to the door.
“Al, thank God,” I said. His tired, bloodshot eyes looked at me for a long time.
“Julius. It’s a bit late for a visit,” he said.
“This is an emergency. Can I use your phone for a minute? I need the police here immediately.” His eyes widened at that, and he looked wide-awake a moment later.
“Sure, sure, come on in,” he said. As soon as I had entered, he closed and locked the door behind me. He pointed towards the kitchen. “Phone’s in there, hanging on the wall next to the door.” I thanked him profusely, visions of my murdered family members running through my head. Then I dialed the police, my fingers shaking so badly that it took me a few tries. Finally, though, I heard it begin ringing, and at that moment, I wondered what exactly I would say.
​
Part 2
https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/17bi9pp/i_found_my_familys_corpses_buried_in_the_forest/

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

On the night of December 22nd, a series of sadistic murders occurred across Northern Europe, but the grotesque, unholy pattern wasn’t recognized right away. There was too much compartmentalization between departments to immediately connect the forensic dots. Seemingly random attacks coalesced in suburban areas. The nighttime home invasions left all of the occupants dead, but far worse than the violent killings themselves, each of the victims were savagely mutilated and mangled.
The unknown perpetrators made no effort to conceal their deeds or erase evidence. No valuables were taken. There were no sexual assaults; and no individual from infants to the elderly were spared the heinous brutality. As the respective authorities from each jurisdiction went to work, they took photos, dusted for fingerprints, and canvassed the neighborhood for relevant leads. It was rudimentary police procedure.
Those were pretty much universal methods for solving murders, no matter where you live in the world. International news coverage of the senseless killing epidemic brought greater awareness to the struggling detectives. They compared notes and realized it obviously wasn’t hundreds of random, unrelated incidents. As unimaginable as it might seem, there was an organized operation to attack innocent families and sadistically torture them. The sheer volume of the savagery and the widespread scope of the incidents called for greater resources.
Interpol might’ve been the most logical organization to steward the investigation, but this was a unique situation where old fashion leg work was definitely needed as well. Being centralized and inner-agency-connected certainly helped facilitate a more unified approach, but the individual department’s efforts led to the greatest progress. Interpol simply compiled the raw data from them and tried to make sense of it. Thats where the greatest challenge came from.
“Our mobile forensic unit collected evidence at the scene. There were bloody fingerprints throughout the home and signs of a horrific struggle. All victims were killed by hand, from what we can determine so far. There were deep claw and bite marks on the bodies, and numerous broken bones from being violently gripped and squeezed. Fingers and limbs were actually torn off the torsos! I’ve never witnessed brutality quite like that in my 23 years on the force. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. If it wasn’t for the human fingerprints in the victim’s blood, I’d suspect it was wild animals that mauled these poor souls. We also took numerous samples of mud on the floor and carpeting, and unbelievably, bare footprint impressions leading inside the residence, and then back outside! The shoeless maniacs who did this horrific crime were obviously powerful and unhinged psychopaths.”
That detailed report from one crime scene unit in the Netherlands closely matched the others in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere. At first, the Interpol detectives assigned to head the investigation thought the multiple reports were accidental duplicates. Only after verifying that each of the disturbing analyses came from a different location did they realize the incredible ‘coincidences’ were too similar to ignore.
Further hindering the process, was the upcoming holidays. Christmas was in a few days and numerous teams were short-staffed. However once the ritualistic murder plot was recognized, all Holiday leave was cancelled for local and international investigators, forensic technicians, and police officers. Everyone needed to be on full alert to defend against the organized, still-unfolding terrorist movement, of undetermined goal and purpose. The authorities were wise to be prepared for future attacks but none of them could’ve handled knowing the truth.
The following night brought just as many vicious murders as the previous. The home invasion death toll trippled, and then later quadrupled. This time, a reluctant witness came forward with jaw-dropping testimony. His claims might’ve been dismissed outright as delusional and the byproduct of his heavy alcohol consumption, but the Danish man offered a couple details which they couldn’t ignore.
“I swear, they were shriveled up and brown like mummified corpses! I know how that sounds but they wore old shriveled rags and had no shoes on their feet. I watched from the alley as one of them stumbled out of that old house on the corner. I’d heard ungodly screams coming from it and looked around the wall to see what the hell was going on. I fully admit I’d been tossed out of the bar for fighting but I was still sober enough to recognize a walking corpse when I saw it! That unholy thing wasn’t alive! It was covered in bog mud and had a rotten noose wrapped around its decayed neck. Then I witnessed it and three others stagger toward the woods. They headed directly into the swamp and I pray I never see or smell such diabolical things ever again.”
The highly agitated, drunken sot was interviewed extensively by the local detectives and then released. He was well known as a harmless vagrant with no prior violent offenses. Then they placed his dubious testimony into the report and shared it with Interpol. Obviously his reliability was circumspect but the mention of the suspects being barefoot warranted a second look. All across Europe, there had been over four thousand of these perplexing massacres associated with the ongoing investigation. Under the dire circumstances, they couldn’t really afford to discount any affidavit, no matter what the witness’s blood alcohol level was.
The director of Interpol instructed those local detectives to pursue the witness statement about the four assailants walking into the swamp. Police dogs pulled the investigators all the way up to the edge of the peat bog itself, where the musty trail went cold. There was considerable evidence to support the man’s bizarre testimony, but none of then could begin to explain why the shuffling footprints ended there. To add to the mounting frustration, none of the collected fingerprints or foreign DNA at any of the crime scenes matched known suspects in the extensive criminal database.
Elsewhere, the unexplained bloody reign of death repeated in over a hundred terrified towns. The newest wave of massacres occurred with virtually no resistance from the civil authorities. After the first two nights of senseless carnage, the frustrated governments sent military patrols to the affected neighborhoods. Soldiers stationed in Germany and Ireland called upon a couple of suspicious figures coming out of wooded areas to identify themselves, but there was no response in either case. After two unheeded warnings they were forced to opened fire. What they discovered after the ‘suspects’ were neutralized was nightmarish and unbelievable.
————
“This can’t be! I’ve just reviewed the autopsy reports. It’s ridiculous. Those bodies didn’t just die! Come on! There has to be a mixup at the processing laboratory records centre. The bodies of the suspects supposedly collected at the scene of those two incidents last night have been dead a long time. Look at the goddamn post mortem photos! They look as though they’ve been buried in the ground for years and the clothing on them is unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
The deputy chief was furious about the lack of professionalism in the organization. There was absolutely no room for screwups of that magnitude. People were terrified. They demanded swift action and a full return to public safety. He telephoned the information clerk involved in the records transfer and immediately fired her on the spot. She protested that the medical files she forwarded from the laboratory were accurate, despite what they depicted; but he wasn’t having it.
Then, on a simultaneous conference call, he demanded for the German and Irish medical examiners to resend the results of their autopsies. Both of them expressed unapologetic distain and indignation.
“How dare you demand anything from us! Your once-acclaimed organization is both bloated and woefully inept.”; The German medical examiner spat. Both Angus and I received these Bronze-Age era cadavers in place of the actual suspects you ordered us to conduct autopsies upon. We simply sent you information for the museum specimens you’ve provided us with. I have no idea where those ancient, moldy cadavers came from but if this is some kind of a sick joke to evaluate our competency, I don’t appreciate it. If you can’t get your organization under control, I’ll be contacting your director to file a formal complaint.”
In a rare equalizing moment of karma, the deputy chief was speechless. He wasn’t used to being dressed down by subordinates in the field. He was too taken aback to immediately process what was said. Once the words sank in, Sebastian was too distracted to worry about receiving a threat to his job, or the petty insult. He let that go and simply sought to clarify the details.
“Wait, are you telling me that both of you received very old specimens that do not appear to have died last night? I’m going to get to the bottom of this immediately. Trust me. I’m going to call and speak with the soldiers who took out the suspects, and I’m also going to confirm with the processing teams at both murder scenes about the condition of the deceased bodies they packed up in the transfer bags.”
As soon as he ended the call with the two belligerent medical examiners, the deputy chief called the records clerk and apologized profusely. He acknowledged he was in the wrong, and had overreacted. Then he offered her job back. If there was one thing Sebastian had learned in his storied career, it was the necessity of being earnest. He was still working on being humble with mixed results.
—————
“I knew you’d be a calling me because I couldn’t believe what we found when we checked the suspect’s vitals.”; The Irish sharpshooter confessed. “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes, Sir! I even took photos with me cell phone. I know that’s not protocol but those things… they definitely ain’t human no more. They were dead, long before I pulled the trigger.”
His call with the German soldier who shot the assailants went pretty much the same way. The distraught man admitted he was absolutely mortified by the withered, dried-up, lifeless figures he discovered after shooting them near the woods. From the military personnel, to the medical crew who packaged the bodies up for transport, to the forensic pathologists themselves, all members of the team had acted professionally. Especially in light of the highly uncomfortable circumstances.
The evidence was all there but it required a complete dismissal of science and logic to accept the truth. The bizarre photos in the report were not the result of a bureaucratic mix up or a hoax. The undead perpetrators of these savage killings were rising out of the nearby swamps and bogs each night on the anniversary of the Winter Solstice. Their apparent motive was to exact their merciless vengeance on the living descendants of their own murderers. They were the fabled ‘bog-men’ who met violent ends thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age. Sacrificed for unknown reasons and then thrown into the surrounding peat bogs to rot. Ironically, the unique biology of the rich soil preserves their restless corpses.
It was up to deputy chief and the other brave and dedicated sentinels of the front lines to stop the angry, rising souls by any means necessary. As Christmas Eve approached, Sebastian wanted to give the gift of peace and freedom from the nightly wave of terror. He organized a mass bog burning, and swamp drainage program across the whole of the entire continent. Wisely and without offering an explanation, his clever purification ritual ended their bloody retaliation. Hopefully they too can now rest in peace.

At the end of my eighth Christmas Eve, I went to bed early like every other year. I remember that my parents always told me, “If you’re not asleep by half-past eight, you’ll get naught beneath the tree ornate.” And there’s no better deterrent than the thought of waking up with zero presents on Christmas.
There I was, nestled in the warmth of my cozy bed, dreaming of presents and candy canes, when a loud ‘thud’ woke me up. Another one followed. Gripped by fear, I hid beneath my covers. Thud. I had completely forgotten about Christmas. Thud. It had to be a burglar breaking in, which is why I dared not venture out of bed.
The door creaked open. I peeked through a small gap in my covers and saw several figures entering with a large bag. A flash of red caught my eye, and I immediately felt a wave of relief.
Tossing my covers aside, I yelled, “Santa!”
Next thing I knew, a large piece of fabric was thrown over me. I tried to scream, but no sound escaped. My breath hitched, and I was plunged into yet another slumber.
I awoke inside the bag. This time, it was loose, so I managed to wriggle around and find the light. I was inside a quaint, pastel rose room adorned with festive decorations. A few red and green boxes were scattered around, with a single red door at one end. With no other options to leave the room, I tiptoed towards the door and pressed my ear against it. Silence. I carefully turned the handle when a voice startled me.
“You can’t escape,” it shrilled. “Stay put.”
I spun around. A small man with pointed ears and a green outfit stood proudly akimbo. He was a little shorter than me but radiated authority.
“You’re an Elf!” I blurted out. “That means … I’m in Santa’s house! But- but why?”
“Ha!” he sneered. “You know very well why. You’ve been a terrible child and ended up on the naughty list.”
“I- what?” I couldn’t believe it. Me? On the naughty list? Had I really been that bad? Was it because of that one cookie I ate after mom told me not to? Or that night I secretly read comics in bed using a flashlight?
As I reflected on this past year’s behavior, I began to accept that I had indeed been a naughty boy, and it was only fair I ended up on the list.
Any attempts at conversing with the Elf were answered with a grunt. Minutes later, a metallic click unlocked the door, and the Elf shot me a nasty grin.
“Next,” yawned the Elf who entered the room.
“That’s you,” said the Elf in the same room as me. “Come on, follow him.”
The new Elf scowled at me when I hesitantly walked out. Although the place was warm, I felt a little exposed being barefoot and in pajamas. He led me through a long, vibrant hallway adorned with ornaments and paintings of reindeer. Something about the expressionist representation of the animals exuded malice. It gradually worsened the nearer we got to a comically large door at the end of the hall.
Looking up, I saw a glaring face painted on the door. It suddenly moved, baring yellow teeth with an air of disgust. “Last naughty boy of the day,” it announced.
The double doors unfurled, compelling me inside. I was greeted by a mahogany desk cluttered with documents, wrapping paper, and some broken toys. Behind it sat a bearded man in a festive red outfit.
“Santa Claus!” I cried out.
The man paused in his writing and peered down over the edge of his crescent-moon glasses.
“That is indeed me, yes,” he replied with a grandfatherly voice, sweet yet stern. “And you are -ah- Christopher. Yes, sit down, please.”
I obeyed. Santa leaned in and spoke in his commanding voice.
“Good. Now, Christopher, I see that you have been a naughty, naughty boy,” he continued, flipping through a binder. “And you know what happens with naughty boys, don’t you?” He waved a list with names. “Let’s see. What will we do with you, my poor, poor Christopher, boy.” He skimmed again, going back and forth.
A few seconds later, he continued with a loud, “Ah! Yes. You shall be an Elf from now on. Five years in the assembly line. For a start.”
My little jaw dropped, and my head tilted sideways. It was a lot to take in for an eight-year-old child.
“I don’t understand, Santa,” I managed to say.
“Oh, oh, oh! You’ll understand soon enough. Now off you go to Emgher. He’s the one who performs the magic.” Santa dismissed me with a wave of his hand.
“But, but… my name isn’t even Christopher, Santa. My name is James,” I protested.
Santa peered at me over his glasses again, a frown creasing his forehead. “You are not Christopher? Is that right?”
I nodded vehemently.
“Let me verify that,” he said.
Santa retrieved a red rotary phone from beneath his desk and dialed a number. He sounded calm, but I noticed his brows furrowing gradually.
Soon, an Elf scurried into the room.
“My deepest apologies, Mr. Claus,” the Elf squeaked with an overly deep bow. “I don’t know how it happened. We thought-“
Santa raised his hand, silencing the Elf.
“This boy,” Santa pointed at me, “is not Christopher?”
“No Mr. Claus. It’s all a mistake,” the Elf admitted sheepishly.
“Very well. To the wrappings with you,” Santa declared, and with a hand clap, the Elf vanished, leaving behind a look of horror that seemed to plead for… what exactly?
“My dear, dear, James,” Santa said as he rose from his leather chair and approached me. “I offer you my deepest apologies. Can you forgive me?”
Santa’s eyes were akin to a gentle grandfather and a dog yearning for more delicious treats.
“Of course,” I replied without hesitation. “How could I be angry at Santa Claus.” I felt so relieved I began to laugh.
“That’s very gracious of you, James,” Santa smiled. “Now, come with me. We need to send you back home.”
I followed the large, bearded man, walking through the same hall as before, except everything felt a lot more festive. Soon, Christmas songs began to resonate through the hall.
We arrived atop a vast hanger. My awe was indescribable. Hundreds of Elfs dressed in green with accents of red and gold were working relentlessly. From building presents to assembling boxes and applying beautiful Christmas wrappings. It was spectacular.
The topmost floor was full of Elfs playing all kinds of instruments, while the workers below joined in the chorus of Christmas carols. Who could’ve guessed that their shrill voices could become a melodic harmony?
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” I gasped.
“And you never will as long as you’re a good boy,” said Santa. “Come now. We must get you home.”
His words struck my mind like a splinter.
“Santa?” I asked. “What happens when you’re on the naughty list?”
“Ho, ho, ho, curious little boy, are we? I guess I do owe you an explanation. But you must first promise to never tell anyone,” Santa said, and I pinky swore. “Good boy.” He ruffled my hair.
“You see all those Elfs?” he said. “All of them, without exception, were once naughty boys and girls who ended up on the list.”
“Wh- kids become Elfs?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, they do,” Santa smiled gently. “Well, those who were on the normal naughty list.”
“There’s more than one list?”
“Oh yes. There are three. The naught list, which turns you into an Elf. The naughty naughty list, which changes you into a toy component, and the very naughty list, which transforms you into a box or wrapping,” he explained.
My jaw dropped for the second time that night. I couldn’t believe my ears.
“What? The toys and… and everything are kids?”
“Naughty children,” corrected Santa. “But yes, they are.”
I shuddered at the thought of becoming a toy, or worse, wrapping paper. All the toys I’d played with came to mind. Especially those I had thrown on the floor and destroyed for fun. Have I really been hurting other kids all those years?
It couldn’t be true. There weren’t enough naughty children to make all those toys. I had to ask Santa because I couldn’t do the math.
“Ho, ho, ho,” he laughed wholeheartedly. “With Christmas magic, you don’t need an entire child for a piece of wrapping. A small piece of a finger would suffice. One naughty child is enough for a thousand toys, or ten thousand Christmas wrappings.”
My voice trembled as I asked, “Do- do you cut their fingers off?”
Santa’s rosy cheeks and fluffy beard painted the picture of a jolly old man. “It’s best not to ask questions you’d rather not hear the answer to,” he advised, placing his heavy hand on my shoulder. “Come now, we must go.”
I reluctantly followed Santa. This hangar wasn’t the magical place I had imagined. It was a slaughterhouse, akin to animals butchering their own, constantly hoping that fatter livestock would be herded quickly enough so they wouldn’t be next on the chopping block.
We descended wooden stairs, with handrails resembling elongated Christmas trees full of life. Each stair glittered with a different color, just like baubles.
On the ground floor I noticed that no Elf was smiling even though they were singing. Some forced a smile when Santa walked by, others cowered away – one of them even bumped into me. What exactly had they done to deserve such a harsh punishment?
“How do you even get on the naughty list, Santa?”
Santa raised one of his fluffy white brows. “Why ask? You wish to become an Elf?”
“Er, no. It’s just that, you know, your Elfs mistook me for a naughty boy, and I remembered many bad things I did this past year,” I explained.
“I see,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what naughty children do, James. If I did, a good boy like you could become a naughty boy. We don’t want that to happen, do we?” The intonation on the last two words sounded like a threat, so I simply nodded and followed the Claus.
We reached the end of the Hangar where several Elfs opened large, paired doors painted in red and marked with white initials “SC”. A glacial gust made me instantly shiver.
“Oh, ho,” Santa chuckled like the jolly old man he was. A finger snap was enough to cover me with warm boots, pants, a coat, a shawl, and a hat.
“Thanks, Santa,” I beamed. It was so comfortable inside that I had forgotten I was still barefoot and in pajamas. I wondered how he could snap fingers with gloves on, though.
“You’re very welcome, James, my boy,” said Santa. “Now, if you will excuse me, I still have much work to do. It’s Christmas after all. My Elfs will lead you to the reindeers so you can fly back home.”
I was so overwhelmed that I could only utter a small “thanks” before Santa wobbled back inside.
The Elfs guided me though the blizzard. We would’ve been in complete darkness if it weren’t for them.
They were glowing like green candles.
“Are you walking lamps?” I asked curiously.
One of the Elf looked at me crossly and sighed. He immediately averted eyes and marched on. Minutes later I began to quiver. Even Santa’s clothes couldn’t protect me from that cold.
“Wh-where are w-we g-g-going?” I stammered.
No answer.
“P-p-plea-ease. I-I’m co-old.”
Still nothing.
When I thought I’d never meet my parents again, we entered an ice cave. One of my guides knocked on a nearly imperceptible door in the back. I couldn’t believe my ears when he said, “Stinkin’ Santa’s Stupid Selfish”.
The door popped open, and a female Elf hurried us in. Once inside, the door slammed shut and vanished completely.
“Woah,” I gasped, not only at the door, but also at the room I was in.
You know that satisfying feeling when you return to the warmth of your home after spending hours playing in the snow? It was the same feeling, except it was soothing, lulling even. Every part of my body had magically warmed up, and Santa’s clothes tattered away in a sparkle of glitter dust. I was yet again barefoot and in my pajamas.
Dozens of Elfs were sitting, reading, playing, some working. That room was the true heart of Christmas. The smell of cookies and hot chocolate was delectable. Ornated trees, music to melt the coldest hearts, and a green-purple flamed hearth. With so much festive clutter around, it was a miracle nothing went ablaze.
“Amazing,” I uttered, gaping and smiling so widely it hurt.
“Yes, yes, you don’t have time for this,” one of the Elfs said. “Give me the talisman.”
“Huh?”
She rolled her eyes and stuck her hand in my pajama’s pocket.
“Hey, what are you– What’s that thing?”
She had taken a small ceramic Christmas ornament that looked like a present. Red letters glowed on the side.
“Our ticket to freedom and exposing Santa. Once we open it in your world, our revenge will be complete and cause widespread panic,” she explained as she dragged me to the top of a chimney protruding from the floor.
“Wait, I–“
“Your house has a chimney?” she asked.
“N-no,” I said. “What’s this thing? Does it lead to the reindeers?”
“Ha!” she snarked. “Those child-eating monsters, you mean?”
I looked at the others, hoping someone would drag me away from this crazy girl, but they simply stared back.
“What do you mean? What’s the chimney for?”
“It’s to deliver presents,” she said. “You go in, and it sends you to the home you wish to visit. It also makes you fireproof.”
“So that’s how Santa delivers presents!”
She shook her head. “No, silly. That’s one of the ways. You don’t have a chimney, remember?
Chimneyless homes require the Sleigh. But it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, yes it does,” I erupted in laughter. “How do you even go around every house with so many presents?”
“Look, we don’t have time to–”
“Just tell him, Zoe,” another Elf chimed in from the back.
Zoe gave him a nasty grimace and ordered me to sit near one of the tables. “That’s all I’m answering, ok?” she warned. “After that, you listen because we have to go.”
I opened my mouth to protest. She quickly made a sign to zip it, and my mouth was zipped close. I stood up panicked, touching the zipper that had become my mouth. There was no slider.
“Elf magic. I’ll unzip it if you settle down, sit, and listen, ok?” Zoe said irritably. I darted around. The other Elfs were calm, so I relaxed and heeded.
“Good,” she said. “Firstly, we’re in another world deep underneath the North Pole. When Christmas starts, every second that passes in Clausland equals to one day in your world. The Sleigh transports us to chimneyless houses, and Elf magic lets us in. When we’re in your world, time is almost frozen in place for us. Got that?”
I nodded, but she didn’t unzip my mouth yet.
“Good,” she nodded like a teacher after scolding a bad student. “Onto the reindeer. Those monsters solely exist to devour extra naughty children and unruly Elfs. Gruesome death I would wish to no one but to Santa.” She unzipped my mouth and smirked. “Questions?”
“Er,” I hesitated, reluctant to have my mouth shut again. “Is Santa–”
“Yes,” she blurted out. “He’s evil. That’s all you need to know – for your own sanity. Now, take these.” She handed me polar clothes. “And this. We have a long way to walk.”
“Why do I need a long sugar cane?”
“It’s a magical sword. Hope you won’t need to use it.”
We were about to leave the room when I dared to say, “I’ll freeze to death if we walk too far. I almost–”
“Died because Santa purposefully gave you magical clothes that look warm, yet retain no heat,” she interrupted. “He always does that to spare his reindeer a lengthy chase for their meal. Let’s go.”
I returned to the blizzard. This time I was surrounded by many Elfs, Zoe in front. All wielded a long sugarcane and a rectangular shield resembling a Christmas present.
We walked and walked, but not once did I feel cold. Even my face seemed magically shielded. I was about to thank Zoe when a horrible cry resonated from behind. An Elf was missing.
“Run!” Zoe shouted.
We hurried into the void. Another scream to my left. A quick glance revealed thin gnarled hands with countless fingers grabbing one of the Elfs into the nothingness of the storm.
“Aaaah!”
Another Elf had been taken, this time right in front of me. The Elfs rushed to his rescue, stabbing and cutting with their sugar canes. I cowardly hid between two Elfs.
A horrible screech followed by something landing at my feet. I jumped when I saw… a bleeding branch? Two Elfs were thrashing a snowman. Purple blood oozed from its wounds until it gargled and melted completely, leaving a black hat and a carrot behind.
Zoe yanked my arm, leading me ahead. We passed the body of an Elf, whose face was unrecognizable.
“Isah, Brendan, cover for us,” she shouted over the howling wind. The voices of the two forsaken Elfs became one with the blizzard.
Every so often, I dared to peak over my shoulder, trying to discern the snowmen’s needle-toothed grin through the storm. If they were nearby, I couldn’t identify them amidst the noise akin to an old television’s static noise.
“We’re at the Grim Grotto,” said Zoe.
We entered another ice cave. Zoe chanted in an unfamiliar language, causing a sudden gravelly noise. A wall jutted out of the ground and shut the entrance close. There was no way out. Complete silence. I felt cut off from the rest of the world, even more than before.
“Where are we?” I puffed, tired from the long trek.
“Don’t you have ears, silly?” Zoe wheezed. “It’s the Grim Grotto. We’re near the Subsidiary Sleigh. The other ones are in a room we can’t access without Santa knowing.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. Zoe noticed.
“That was the easy part,” she scowled. “Remember the reindeer? They’re guarding the Sleigh, and it won’t be easy to reach. Break’s over. Stand up. The snowmen might alert Santa.”
“What were those things?” I asked.
“You’ve seen them. Abominations. Created by Santa himself to patrol the boundaries. Lucky we didn’t meet the Snow Angels or we’d all be dead.”
Zoe seemed to be out of breath each time she spoke. I soon realized why.
“You’re bleeding,” I blurted.
“Oh, you’ve finally figured out this isn’t part of my festive outfit?”
“You need a doctor,” I said naively.
“That’s not how things work here. The only one capable of healing us is Santa, and he won’t budge for me, that’s certain. Either it’s a superficial wound and I’ll be fine, or it’s not and I’ll bleed out. But now is not the time to worry, we must get you back home.”
She zipped my mouth again. I protested with… unrefined hand signs, which were duly ignored. I wasn’t angry, just frustrated I couldn’t help the little girl.
The grotto’s unexpected brightness guided us around. It resembled dim sun rays piercing through a thick layer of ice. Zoe seemed to know her way in this labyrinth of forking tunnels.
We arrived at yet another fork. A nauseous mixture of bad breath, rot and manure made me feel sick. I tried to speak but all it accomplished was a muffled mumble.
“Is it important?” hissed Zoe. I nodded and she released the zipper.
“What’s that smell?” I asked.
“The reindeer,” she said. “They’re near.”
She entered the tunnel with the pungent odor, followed by the unconcerned Elfs. I looked back, thinking of returning to the entrance. Then I remembered the flesh-eating snowmen, and thought I’d rather take my chances with the unknown that lay ahead.
Zoe stopped behind a boulder, signaling me to approach. The tunnel had expanded into a large cave.
“Shush now. Look,” she gestured at something far below.
I spotted a magnificent sleigh. It would fit the exact description of “Santa’s sleigh”. She noticed my awe and nudged me, pointing towards something else nearby. It was a reindeer. And another one. Then a few more. At least a dozen of them, surrounded by many bones.
“What now?” I asked.
“We climb down the stairs.”
The ‘stairs’ she spoke of was a narrow and sharply steep path down the precipice.
“I hope you’re not afraid of heights?” she smiled.
Zoe went first, followed by the other Elfs. I was paralyzed by fear, convinced that I’d slip and fall to my death.
“Want me to shove you off?” the last Elf smirked. “Maybe you’ll grow wings before the big splatter.”
Being pushed forward, I descended one step at a time, clutching onto the rocks to my right. A dozen or so steps later, I became a bit more comfortable and progressed a little faster.
Near the bottom was a landing carved inside the cliffside. It was a good vantage point to observe the Sleigh in all its glory, guarded by the ferocious reindeer, who were trotting aimlessly, fighting each other, even wounding one another. Worst of all, their injuries healed almost instantly.
One stood by, anticipating another reindeer’s charge. When the assailant was close, both their mouths expanded significantly, exposing rows of jagged, pointed teeth. Their entire bodies grew into a veinous mass of muscles, fighting antlers and hooves.
“You think we’ll make it?” one of the Elfs asked Zoe.
“Bad timing for cowardice, Kevin. There’s only one way out,” answered Zoe.
Looking at Kevin was like seeing myself in the mirror. I found it weird that an Elf would be scared, until I remembered he was a child, just like me.
“What’s next?” another female Elf asked.
Zoe glanced at me before she said, “We stick to the plan. I go first, followed by James, then you, Kevin, and the rest. When I say ‘run’, we sprint to the Sleigh.”
Everyone agreed. Zoe went first, and Kevin pushed me forward. We carefully made our way down the stairs, brandishing weapons and shields. Zoe’s was fingering something in her pocket, her candy cane sheathed.
The instant her curled shoe touched the ground, every reindeer swiveled their head towards us, like a missile locked on its target. Zoe pulled her hand from her pocket and threw mistletoe berries far ahead, yelling, “RUN!”
Every reindeer clomped in our direction, each stride dislodging stones from the ground. No way any of us could get to the Sleigh. Those things were supernaturally fast.
One of them touched one of the red berries. Bang! The reindeer was startled as the berry abruptly expanded like a rising tablecloth, capturing the animal, and sealing it with a green ribbon.
The other beasts stopped in their tracks as they observed the red bag bulging from every angle, hearing a muffled screech coming from within. I was so stunned by what had happened that my feet were rooted in place. The other Elfs weren’t, though. Zoe had arrived near the Sleigh, frantically hitting an invisible wall with her candy cane.
I got back to my senses and ran. So did the reindeer. From behind, I heard bang after bang, but the sound of hooves was rapidly approaching. I peeked over my shoulder for one second and saw one’s mouth in all its glory. It was far worse than the snowmen.
My feet kept moving but I closed my eyes because I knew I was dead. My own stupidity is what saved me; I stumbled on a rock and fell, the reindeer jumping over me to maul the Elf ahead of me. I leapt up and passed the gruesome scene, crying, screaming. Most other Elfs were frantically bashing the wall when a shattering sound told me they got through.
Next thing I knew, Zoe kicked Kevin toward one of the reindeer and rushed to the Sleigh. His last moments were too horrible to describe.
I kept running, trying to ignore the bangs and the reindeers galloping like mad. Two more Elfs were holding the beasts at large by shooting baubles from their candy canes. I didn’t even know they could do that, but it was pretty efficient. Each bauble shattered into clouds of glitter, electrocuting the reindeer as the smoke came down.
Meanwhile, Zoe was already in the Sleigh, handling something.
“Don’t leave without us,” a girl Elf shouted. That moment of inattention had cost her life.
I took my candy cane by the rounded handle and pretended it was a gun. Baubles shot from its end, hitting the reindeer in front of me, clearing the passage. I fired a volley of baubles behind me, partially incapacitating the pursuing monsters.
Only one other Elf remained. He slowly backed away, struggling to keep the biggest reindeer down.
“Stop,” Thump! “getting,” Thump! “up,” Thump! “you,” Thump! “piece of,” Thump! Thump!
His left side was clear. I sprinted past the convulsing reindeer and hopped onto the Sleigh, only to be pushed back by Zoe.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
When I looked up, she looked like a maniac.
“Empty. I gotta go,” the shooting Elf said, leaving his weapon behind as he jumped into the Sleigh.
I tried to reenter, but she repelled me with such force that my elbow broke as I shielded my fall. I gripped my broken arm, crying. Zoe stared and laughed. The Sleigh began to glow bright red.
“There’s a reason I was on the naughty list, silly,” she grinned. “Enjoy Christmas hell, James.”
Before I could get up, the Sleigh had vanished in a flash of red. I immediately turned to my left to see… no reindeer. They were also gone. The only thing remaining on the ground was a glowing red cube.
“The present!” I gasped, pocketing the small ceramic ornament, and stood up. I had completely forgotten about it.
Behind the Sleigh’s former location was a nearly imperceptible door. I turned the handle and entered, only to discover another sleigh made of wood. It was simple, aged, but slightly damaged. I clambered in and found a washed out set of instructions, barely legible.
HOW TO USE

1. Sit tight.
2. Pronounce the place name out loud and clearly.
3. Close eyes.
4. Open eyes when hearing jingle.

A crashing jingle echoed from beyond the room. Through the open door, I barely recognized the Sleigh that had returned. It was cracked and toppled over, covered in gore with two reindeer feasting on… I didn’t want to think about it.
“I want to go back home,” I sobbed.
One of the reindeer hurtled through the doorway. I instinctively closed my eyes. Next thing I knew, I heard a jingle and peeped through my eyelashes.
“Home!” I cried, jumping out of the sleigh.
I looked around, incredulous. Snow graced the ground without blizzard, meat-eating snowman, or monstrous reindeer. I tried to enter, but I was locked out. Of course, I was. Everyone was fast asleep inside.
I shivered as I ran down the side path. My warm clothes had disappeared. All that remained was my good old pajamas.
Using my left hand, I opened the toilet window. Mom always left it unlocked in case someone forgot the keys. I was too short to climb through, but luckily, there was a small stepladder in the garden. I squeezed in and crashed down. Excruciating pain surged from my fractured elbow.
Lights flashed on, and I screamed, not from pain, but from fear. Fear that another Elf had returned to drag me back to Clausland. When the toilet door opened, and mom and dad’s familiar faces loomed above me, warm tears streamed down my cheeks.
Seven weeks later, I was completely healed. My injury was in fact a hairline fracture. Mom and dad had been livid that I’d been ‘playing’ outside in the middle of the night. It goes without saying that they didn’t believe a word of my grisly experience.
We went to the ER and returned home after sunrise. Although my parents were angry, they let me open my presents before tucking me in my safe haven. I can’t recall what I received that day, but what I do remember is that I didn’t rip off the Christmas wrapping like I did every year. Instead, I delicately unfolded it without leaving a single tear, and stored them in a drawer. The piles I accumulated over the years still remain at my current home.
Of the toys I took utmost care. Even though Zoe had shown her true colors at the end, I can’t imagine that every naughty kid was as bad as her. Even she didn’t deserve to go that way.
I must admit that imagining children’s remains as toys was strange at first. As for everything, you get used to it. Except for one thing. Every Christmas, even as an adult, I stay awake or party till dawn, fearing an Elf might bring me back. It marked me so much that I decided not to have any children in case the Claus awaits his revenge – if he ever found out.
As for the ceramic ornament, I never opened it. Something rattles inside, and when Christmas nears, bright red letters appear, forming “SLU CA NATAS”. I never found out its meaning, but I vividly remember what Zoe said. Whatever that revenge may be, this little Pandora’s Box will remain sealed for years to come.

Regarding the hostage scene in the beginning: Killing of the assassin is a bit bloody, and happens right next to Jiang Juening. Xie Wei shields her from blood splatter with the large sleeves of his robes. This gets compared to Zhang Zhe shielding her from a snowball later, when they are trapped in the monastery in Tong City. (The words for "blood" and "snow" are Mandarin homophones.) It also establishes early on that Xie Wei cares for her more than he leads us to believe.
Regarding missing Yan Lin's coming of age ceremony: Jiang Xuening did not attend Yan Lin's coming of age ceremony in her first life not because she wants to reject him and become Queen, but because she had to pick up his birthday present (that same sword), which then causes her to be late. By the time she gets to the door, the slaughter has started, and she is greeted by a severed head that rolled out the door to her feet. The young lady is horrified, and goes back home. Poor Yan Lin is heartbroken, thinking she had betrayed him.
Regarding Xie Wei after Jiang Xuening's suicide in her first life: Xie Wei takes with him a can of snow (Xuening's "xue" means "snow"), and, with the same knife that she used to take her own life, kills himself in a monastery beside the graves of the 300 children. A young monk comes over to his room, and sees a waterfall of blood running down the front door steps, half of Xie Wei white robes stained red, and a cleanly wiped knife placed next to a golden hairpin and a can of melted snow.
Regarding You Fangyin in Jiang Xuening's first life: You Fangyin in Jiang Xuening's first life is a time traveler. The original You Fangyin actually drowned, without Jiang Xuening there to save her, and her body is taken over by a time traveler from the modern days. The new You Fangyin is an outstanding businessperson, and becomes the richest woman in the country. When Xie Wei's rebellion starts, she had no choice but to give up all her assets in exchange for her life. She gets confined in the Kunning (Ningan) palace with Jiang Xuening. It is also from her where Jiang Xuening learns of the silk investment, Ren Weizhi's salt wells business, and the modern stocks trades system. So in her second life, when she instructs the original You Fangyin to invest in Ren Weizhi's business, she actually purchases interest in the business, and states clearly in their contract that she is free to transfer such interest to whoever she wishes.
Regarding You Fangyin in Jiang Xuening's second life: Jiang Xuening had no intention to save You Fangyin. She does not know about the time traveling, of course, but only knows that the richest woman of the country was orginally a bullied weakling from the You family, and seemingly became a whole new person following a drowning "accident". She wants to befriend this girl before she becomes rich, so she would have the strongest financial backup. (Why she was curious to attend the You's chrysanthemum gathering in the first place.) It is only when Jiang Xuening gets to the lake that she cannot bear to watch the poor girl suffer, and stops the servants in time to save You Fangyin in this second life. But she is disappointed to see that it is still the same weak You Fangyin who wakes up, and not the businesswoman she originally knew. Fortunately for Jiang Xuening, this original You Fangyin is weak and timid, but is far from a damsel in distress. She makes a lot of her own decisions that proves her to be quite daring. For example, when Jiang Xuening goes into "green tea mode", deliberately showing her how much You Yue's "bullied" her in the palace (when she was the one who tried to drown You Yue in the fish tank), all the while saying, "It's OK, I can bear with it," You Fangyin makes up her mind on taking revenge for her "kind and gentle" saviour. She knows from Jiang Xuening that while Ren Weizhi is a genius inventor, his business initially suffers great losses, so she lures You Yue to purchase stocks in his salt wells business, and waits for You Yue to lose all her investment. Although You Yue is actually pretty resilient, and firmly believes that it will not be a loss, her parents sell the shares behind her back to "cut the losses" anyway. When word gets out that the business becomes a great success, You Yue loses her mental stability, and spends her days screaming and throwing furniture at her parents, saying how much her stocks' prices have risen. You Fangyin also does not need Lyu Xian's heroic rescue, as she aleady had a deal with Ren Weizhi, only promising to invest in his business if he agrees to arrange a fake marriage with her, so she can leave her abusive household. She leaves with him to his homeland, and professionally manages the salt wells business as his wife. When Jiang Xuening leaves the capital city, she actually goes to live with this now rich and successful businesswoman. You Fangyin is aware of Jiang Xuening's original disappointment after saving her, however, and in her final moments, asks Jiang Xuening if she has lived up to the You Fangyin that Jiang Xuening sees in her eyes. She also recalls seeing a young lady resembling herself walking towards her as she almost drowned, only going away after Jiang Xuening saves her.
Regarding Zhang Zhe: Zhang Zhe is also experiencing his second life. This is why he has been so protective of Jiang Xuening despite having only met her once or twice, and how he knows of the missing approval seal on the Emperor's decree at Yan Lin's coming of age ceremony. This is also the primary reason for his bad ending with Jiang Xuening, because they both know, like how a repaired vase still has a visible crack, both of them remembering what had happened in their previous lives (Jiang Xuening forcing him to judge Zhou Yinzhi innocent, resulting in him being jailed, and his mother dead), means they will never be able to maintain a pure relationship. (His mother is alive and well in Jiang Xuening's second life.) When Jiang Xuening gathers all her courage to confess her love, he gently addresses Jiang Xuening as "My Queen", as he did in their first lives, and Jiang Xuening knows that all is over.
Regarding Xie Wei's personality: Xie Wei is regarded as a saint by the whole court, but is actually a wolf in sheep's skin. His primary motivations throughout are more about revenge, and less saving the Yan family. In Jiang Xuening's first life, Xie Wei allies with Yan Lin, and successfully takes over the imperial palace together. However, when he discovers that Yan Lin confined Jiang Xuening, and repeatedly paid her "nightly visits", he does not hesitate to send a dagger to the Queen, hoping for her to kill him the next time he is there. Yan Lin is shocked to discover the cousin who he has fought side by side with during all these years actually wanted him dead. Even in Jiang Xuening's second life, there are seldom tender moments between him and Jiang Xuening. His love for her somehow translates to sexual assault and outright attempted rape. What finally pulls them together is their repeated sacrifices for each other in times of danger, like him piercing his palm with a sword in exchange for her life when she is held hostage.
Regarding Jiang Xuehui: While Jiang Xuening stops bullying Jiang Xuehui, she never truly reconciles with her. She sees her nonchalance towards her birth mother Wanniang as cold and heartless, and cuts her sister out of the picture after returning the jade bracelet to her, which Jiang Xuehui proceeds to smash. As for her marriage with Shen Jie, he loses his love for her a short while after marriage, and grows closer to the outgoing Fang Miao from their daily cute banters.
Regarding Xie Wei rescuing the princess: Xie Wei promises Jiang Xuening he will rescue the married princess from the hands of foreigners. He fakes an Emperor's decree that grants Yan Lin control of an army. When the Emperor learns of Yan Lin's movements and questions his loyalty, he sends the "coincidentally" nearby Xie Wei to inspect, granting him a real Emperor's decree. Xie Wei does not hesitate to show his support for Yan Lin upon his arrival. No one dares question the respected court official from the imperial capital. With Lyu Xian and You Fangyin's financial support for military supplies and rations, Yan Lin swiftly annihilates the foreign army and rescues the abused princess. Xie Wei reports that he, weak and scholarly, was coerced into it all by the powerful army general Yan Lin. The Emperor believes none of it, but cannot openly punish those who brought peace to the country borders.
Regarding the rebels Xie Wei works for: The rebels actually belong to a cult, and one quality of the members is that they "cultivate" with women. When Jiang Xuening is kidnapped by the cult, Xie Wei convinvces the cult leader that she is his "cultivation partner." They spend nights in the same room together, with Jiang Xuening moaning from pleasure. After a few tries, the "experienced" Jiang Xuening is no longer embarrassed, and deliberately tries to arouse him, causing him to order that she cut the moaning short, to which she replies, "Isn't that too short of a duration?" He does not find that joke funny...
Regarding the death of Zhou Yinzhi: The Emperor sends Zhou Yinzhi to the country borders to check on possibilities of Xie Wei joining forces with Yan Lin in rebellion. On his way there, Zhou Yinzhi, also on the Emperor's orders, seized all of You Fangyin's assets under the name of "treason" (financially supporting Yan Lin's troops). Jiang Xuening finds out about it, and Zhou Yinzhi, in panic, robs and kills You Fangyin, and escapes. Jiang Xuening orders to kidnap Zhou Yinzhi's pregnant concubine, and uses her to blackmail Zhou Yinzhi. Although Zhou Yinzhi does as told, Xie Wei brings him to Jiang Xuening, holds Jiang Xuening's hand, and guides her as she runs a blade across Zhou Yinzhi's throat. He dies, still worrying for his pregnant concubine.
Regarding Xie Wei's final gambit: When the cult kidnaps Jiang Xuening, Xie Wei feigns submission, and guides the cult's army in taking over cities leading to the imperial capital. Upon arriving at the city closest to Yan Lin's secret army, Xie Wei takes control of the cult with Yan Lin's assistance, and orders the cult leader to continue his way to the imperial capital (although not before crippling BOTH of his hands first). With his life on the line, the cult leader has no choice but to oblige, essentially turning the cult into Xie Wei's first wave attacker in his war against the court, all the while with Xie Wei leading Yan Lin's troops to chase them in the name of "obliterating rebels". For every city taken over by the cult, Yan Lin strolls in to rid the city of the few cult soldiers remaining after the tough battles at city walls. In just five months' time, Xie Wei and Yan Lin have arrived in the imperial capital, as heavenly saviours who rid the country of the devilish rebels.
Regarding the final showdown in the palace: Xie Wei and Yan Lin further force the cult leader and his few remaining soldiers into the main chambers of the imperial palace, where the Emperor, after a bloody battle, sits at his throne, hair untied, barefoot, and laughing maniacally, no longer looking at all like royalty. With him are Shen Jie (Emperor's brother), Xue Yuan (Xie Wei's father), Xue Ye (Xue Yuan's son), Gu Chunfang (Zhang Zhe's teacher), Jiang Boyou (Jiang Xuening's father), the fake Xue Dingfei, and the now Emperor's concubine, Xue Shu. Xie Wei casually strolls in, and the cult leader reveals him to be the real Xue Dingfei, shocking all those who are present. Xue Yuan, in his last attempt to save himself, reminds Xie Wei of their kinship, to which Xie Wei coldly replies, "Yes, so how do you wish to die?" The panicked Xue Yuan runs for the front doors. Xie Wei calmly takes a bow and arrow, orders for the Empress Dowager to be invited to the party, and sends three arrows through the escaping Xue Yuan's back, heart, and skull. Daoqin stabs a sword through Xue Ye's heart as he tries to attack Xie Wei in revenge for his father. Jianshu returns with the Empress Dowager, now in a frenzied state, and Xie Wei offers her and the Emperor the sadistic choice of her killing him, or him, her. It does not take long for the Emperor to pick up the sword, all the while revealing to onlookers the truth of events in the underground tunnel from 20 years ago. The Emperor pushes the sword through the Empress Dowager's body as Shen Jie watches in horror, turns to Xue Shu, and sends her on her way in a similar fashion. The princess arrives with soldiers, but only pleads for Xie Wei to allow the Emperor a dignified death. Xie Wei agrees, but simultaneously decapitates the Emperor in one swift sword strike, sending the severed head rolling to the princess's feet. Yan Lin makes the final kill as he sends his sword through the cult leader's neck, retrieving from him the Emperor's jade seal.
Regarding Yan Lin: Yan Lin recovers his memories from Jiang Xuening's first life from a "dream", now realising what Jiang Xuening said about him treating her very badly to be reality. When he gets hold of the jade seal after the palace showdown, he hands it to Jiang Xuening and gently says, "I was wrong. I no longer want it, I will no longer take it. I am returning this to you," as during her first life, she was entrusted with it by dying Emperor, and was forced to give it up following Yan Lin's rebellion.
Regarding the aftermath: Yan Lin hands the jade seal to Jiang Xuening, essentially letting her choose the next Emperor, also promising that if she wants none of them to be on the throne, he will kill them all for her. The hesitant Jiang Xuening looks back and forth between Xie Wei and the princess, and makes the final decision to hand the jade seal to the princess. Xie Wei, believing that Jiang Xuening will leave him for Zhang Zhe, walks out of the chambers angry and heartbroken. Jiang Xuening follows, and promises him that she is here to stay. The princess once again asks Jiang Xuening if she is sure of being in love with such a dangerous man, to which Jiang Xuening replies, "I am sure, and I want to marry him."
Regarding the country's future: With no one on the throne, the princess becomes a temporary "Empress", who only briefly reviews and approves suggestions drafted by a committee of court officials. Without all the bureaucratic procedures, everything runs more efficiently than when there was an actual Emperor. The State Treasury, however, is low on funds due to the prior Emperor's lavish spendings. The princess authorises Jiang Xuening the remaining funds, and allows her to make whatever investments she wishes, as long as she returns a percentage of earnings as "commission fees". To allow for convenient summoning for meetings with the princess, Jiang Xuening is granted residence in the Kunning Palace.
An unimportant detail: During a particularly boring lesson in the palace, Jiang Xuening takes a book of poetry, and starts filling in all the holes and spaces of every word with ink. (So, say the letter "o", for example, would become a large black dot.) Turns out that the once evil scheming Queen is not so above us after all.