Hell

The little creature laughed as they dragged it out of the 4x4. Its voice was raspy, like a granite boulder being polished by paper made of shattered glass. It was fat, the height of a seven year old child, its skin dark grey-brown. Its eyes bulged out of their sockets, and had an evil gleam. Three of them held it down as the other two grabbed the wooden splinters and mallets.

It did not flinch as the first splinter found purchase in its chest, where its heart would lie. No blood issued forth from the wound, only a sickening squelching sound as the mallet drove the wooden splinter in, like a stake through the heart of a vampire. It continued to laugh its laugh as the two pounded further, driving the splinters deeper into the creature’s cold flesh. Infuriated, one of the boys placed a splinter over one of its eyes, and hammered it deep into the socket, through the eye. The eye did not burst, nor did any liquid or bodily fluid splatter or seep out. The splinter made a neat hole, like that made by a spoon in thick chocolate sauce. A similar wound showed where the other boy drove a splinter into the creature’s forehead. It continued to laugh.

---

He knew they were in hell. Knowledge in dreams always comes that way; you just know. They were standing in a room, not small but not big. It was filled with water, about waist deep, grey water, the colour of ash, cold, with chunks of ice and slush floating in it. It was neither dark nor light, almost like dusk, yet clearer, and darker. The light seemed to come from the water, it was almost grey. He couldn’t feel the cold, couldn’t feel anything for that fact. It also occurred to him that the normal rules of physics didn’t apply, there was no gravity here. He didn’t know when, but at times he could float. He couldn’t decide when he wanted to, yet he knew that there would be a time when it would be possible, perhaps for no reason at all.

He also knew that they were here for killing the creature, even though the creature was without doubt unspeakably evil. They were dead, he knew that much, but they were not afraid. It seemed as if this was nothing but another Saturday afternoon, trading jokes with each other around a braai.

He could remember the moments from before they were sent here only vaguely: speeding in the bakkie, sitting in the back, holding onto the creature’s body, in a hurry, yet not knowing why. He could remember hanging onto the bakkie desperately, afraid he would fall of the back as it sped along. He remembered falling off, and seeing a power line fall down. None of is thoughts were coherent.

---

He could float. No reason why, no indication of change in the atmosphere, if it could be called that. He could just float. He floated upwards, above a step in The Room, and into a sky that wasn’t there seconds before. He floated up, forwards, down. Below him lay what appeared to be a city, vast, yet contained within a glass bubble, like a city from Star Wars. As he approached the glass barrier, he looked inside and realised that they were not in hell. The city behind the glass was hell.

The city didn’t fit any of the usual descriptions of hell, apart from millions upon millions of tortured, screaming souls. Chaos was seething through the multitudes, souls on top of souls, screaming in agony. He knew that to go there was madness. He would do anything to escape this.
Instead of Satan stalking among the tortured, God was in charge here. He did not know why or how he knew, but he knew. He watched in horror for several minutes, before he realised that God was in fact standing just the other side of the glass barrier, an amused look on his face. Stranger still, he could look at God’s face, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t describe what God looked like, no matter how closely he looked, yet he could read his facial expression, watch him smile.

“How do I get out of here? I don’t want to go to hell.” The boy addressed God.
God spoke to the boy, told him what must be done, all the while looking amused, enjoying the prospect of putting the boy through this. The boy listened as God told him what to do, but couldn’t hear his voice, and could not recount exactly what had been said. He did not have any recollection of God talking, but knew that he had, and knew what he had to do in order to get out of hell.

---

The boy described to the others how they were supposed to look in the ice water in The Room for one of their corpses. Once they found it, they were supposed to move it to a place outside The Room and bury it there. They had been given two giant monkey wrenches to help them with the job. The corpse was frozen over, but badly decomposed, and when they tried to move it, it would more than likely fall apart, not frozen anymore but soft, oozing blood, bile, and other bodily fluids. But it was their only way of escaping this purgatory, and the eternal hell that came with it.

They splashed through the ice cold water in The Room, searching for the boy’s corpse. Two boys had a wrench, the one whose corpse they were searching for, and the boy who had spoken with God. They came upon a solid block of ice, rectangular, roughly the shape of a corpse. None of them was scared; they were all having fun, some laughing. As the two boys with the wrenches raised them to smash the ice, another boy punched through the ice block. It smashed, and a woman rose up, like Dracula from his coffin. She was laughing, and the boys realised that God had played a joke on them.

They continued looking for the frozen corpse. Eventually they found a huge rectangular dish, a Ziploc container, which was frozen solid. It was cold to the touch, yet they couldn’t feel the cold; they just knew. Inside, however, the contents were not frozen at all. It was like looking into a clear dish of frozen tomato soup, with chunks of meat and red sauce floating around in it. Each boy was sickened by the idea of removing the contents of that dish, and burying it elsewhere, yet they knew they had to.

---

They had evidently completed their task, because none of the boys was in hell or purgatory. They were not in heaven either, but they were content. It was done.