“Jimmy! Get the door! Mama’s working!”
I could hear the bedsprings and the headboard and my mother being stretched to the limits in the next room. The doorbell rang again. No way. No way in Hell I was getting up to open that door.
I blinked.
I was at the door. The locks unlocked themselves. I backed away as far as I can. The door followed me. No matter how far or fast I ran, I’m still right in front of the door.
It opened. And there, standing in the hallway, was a frail man in a black suit with a white collar. Silvery hair and glasses.
“Praise the Lord, Jimmy. Are you ready for Vacation Bible School?”
I wanted to punch him right in the balls. I wanted to gouge his eyes out. I wanted to sink my teeth into his throat until this sick bastard was begging for mercy.
But all I did was cry. That’s really all you can do when you’re nine years old.
I blinked again.
I was in the church rectory. It never occurred to me how disgustingly ironic that name was, given what had happened to me here all those years ago. Given what was about to happen again. The man in black locked the door behind him and started to unbuckle his pants. I remember that, when this really happened to me as a kid, it was probably the last time I ever said “Oh, God” out loud. After all, what was the fucking point? Not like He did a damn thing to stop it. After all, this was His man, about to literally have his way with my nine year old ass.
I wanted to look away, but something about his face. I never ever forgot that face, even after the last time I’d seen it, when I was an adult and had, in fact, come back here to gouge out his eyes and make him scream for mercy.
This wasn’t that same face. And this certainly wasn’t that same grin. No, this grin was dumb. And gap- toothed.
Seamus!
“Surprise, Kingston!”
Reliving my childhood rape, with the role of Father McMurray being played this week by fucking Seamus, of all people?
That was just not right.
“Silly pretty boy. This is Hell. There’s no rules here. There are no bodies or walls or time or place. It’s all a state of mind that all boils down to one word: suffering. Let me show you.”
He slapped me before he pulled out a hunting knife and started to cut off my clothes.
You’ll excuse me if I choose to skip the gory details of my priestly defilement here in Hell. Let’s just say that, when it was all said and done, Seamus was much more adventurous, imaginative, and bloody than Father McMurray could ever have dreamed to be. It wasn’t just about sex and violence. It was about degradation & humiliation. In the real world, Father McMurray just wanted to soil my body. Here, Seamus wanted to spoil my soul. And despite all my seemingly fatal injuries and violations, it never seemed to end.
More importantly, I realized through my agonizing torture that Seamus never seemed to end either. And no matter how much he upped the ante, he could never find release or satisfaction. He was, in fact, in pain. Agony.
This was a punishment far worse than I could have imagined. The two of us forced to fuck each other to pieces for all eternity, no end in sight. And through my ruptured lip and shattered teeth, I giggled just a little. Come on, Seamus: is that all you’ve got?
Seamus tried harder and harder, and only injured himself more in the process. Crying and bleeding from all the wrong places, Seamus was wretched. I could never have imagined that it was possible to extract so much pain from another soul so deeply through my own suffering.
I think this is where Seamus miscalculated. He assumed that because I was refined, tailored, elegant, and professional, it somehow made me soft on the inside. He didn’t understand that my exterior restraint was there to hold back the monster inside. He wanted to spoil a soul for his master that was already black as coal.
By then, I’d turned the tables. I gave as good as I got. I used my own flesh as a weapon against his. Matching him violation for violation. It was as if time had stopped.
Hell was exquisite. Sublime. I taunted and tormented Seamus even more. I spat on him and smeared him with his own filth. I realized what a waste my life had been. I’d spent so much time keeping my emotions in check that I had made sure all of my hits were clean and antiseptic. I never imagined how much more I could have gotten out of my work if I had just let go and thrown caution to the wind, reveling in the pain of all of those people like I was devouring Seamus.
Here. In Hell.
I’d never been happier.
Finally, Seamus cried out to the air around him, to anyone but me who might hear.
“You promised me! You promised me satisfaction if I gave myself to you and brought you souls! You lying bastard!”
It took me a moment to realize who he thought he was talking to.
Then I could feel the temperature drop in the room. Inside this poor, decimated faux-rectory, smeared with blood and excrement and gore, everything turned bone-cold on a dime. Frost and icicles grew instantaneously from all the walls and windows. Frostbite dug into every single limb. Stabbing sharp pain. So cold it actually felt like it burned. Even as the lights grew dark around us, the ice all seemed to glow with a cold, low, blue flame. A fire that can never die.
Seamus and I were no longer even recognizable as anything we could ever imagine as ourselves. Brittle, frozen, wretched blobs of lacerated flesh, struggling to scream with fractured jaws in pain & horror as the walls of the rectory split apart around us, leaving us lying on a craggy, ice-covered wasteland. A lake of cold fire, filled with the echoing moans of the miserable undead, all scattered about and sunken into the icy plane by the millions in all directions as far as the eye could see. Lumps of living, shrieking misery that dotted the landscape like the cultivated fields of a farmer of woes.
And, then, in the crackle of lightning from the dark clouds gathered among the stalactites of ice that seemed miles above us, I saw it. At first, I thought it was some distant mountainous glacier in the distance. But then it moved. And the moans of the undead sufferants turned to wails of pure, unadulterated horror, knowing what would come next.
The glacier unfurled, revealing that it was really coiled, snow-covered batwings that were miles across and towering over us like the Andes. Wrapped inside its own wings, the monster within had jet black skin, with millions upon millions of twitchy insect arms and wriggling tentacles covering its body like some awful pelt, topped by a black goat’s head the size of an aircraft carrier.
Its eyes glowed red, like blazing search-lamps that skimmed the surface of the frozen boneyard, leaving tracks of smoldering putrid ice in the wake of their gaze, until they found the quivering lumps of frosted desecrated meat piles that were all that were left of me and Seamus. It snorted puffs of blue fire from its nostrils as the intensity of its gaze made running boils form on our skin. Seamus wailed as the few remaining teeth in his mouth melted from his wretched gums like white chocolate chips on a hot summer day.
“I served you! I praised you! I sent you souls! So many souls!”
The beast opened its mouth, and millions of the chewed-up damned spilled out between its teeth and drool like stale, uneaten breadcrumbs. Some screamed all the way down to the ice below, while others were snatched, mid-fall, by the beast’s appendages and hurled back into its waiting maw. It spoke, and its voice made the very ice beneath us quiver, like the sound of a million fingernails being drawn across an endless chalkboard.
Seamus waved a bloody, dislocated, wart-covered stump that used to be his arm at me. “Kingston! What about Kingston?”
The goat’s jaws pulled back and pouted a column of fire into the air as it laughed. Those who composed its meal were shot out into the air like screeching fireworks that rained down on the rest of us in a nightmarish hailstorm. The frost-entombed sufferants screamed and cried. But as for me, I was simply stunned at just how much the monstrous laugh sounded just like my own.
