White and Other Tales of Ruin

her dental records related to what was left of a car crash victim in France, a million possibles snicking and snacking through the organisation’s computers until match was found, match, a convergence of information that would mean a lifetime of misery for me instead of a vain, empty hope.

So they searched, and I searched, but all the while hope was slipping through my fingers. Whichever radical cult she’d hooked up with, they would have taken her far away from me. Already I would be little more than a vague memory in her mind, a confusing image of what a father should have been, an unbeliever, a waste. I sent out a plea over the net? there were groups that provided a search service, both electronically and, more expensively, physically? but even they admitted that the chances were slim. Most of the religious groups that had sprung up over the past decade eschewed technology, and it was already likely that Laura was essentially removed from existence.

All she’d have left would be herself, and whatever skewed faith she had found.

More than me, at least.

The route to Hell can only be found by those who need it the most. It is never advertised or discussed openly in public — there are no books about it, no documentaries — but just as the true reality of things is hidden beneath the manufactured patina of everyday life, so most people know about Hell. They know about it and believe in it, but they never honestly feel that they need it. Things can never get that bad, they think. My life can’t drop to those depths, surely.

I went looking without knowing what I was looking for. I’m sure that’s how I discovered Hell so easily. I was wandering the streets one evening, listening out for anything that sounded like a religious meeting. There were many gatherings in the city, many religions, all of them right and all of them wrong, as ever. My walk took me along one street, down the next, across open shopping plazas and through a park. There were a lot of people around now that the sun had gone down, and all those I saw appeared to have somewhere to go. I was aimless, and I stuck out like a gorilla with blue hair. My face was slack, my eyes wide and demanding, my mouth moving silently, betraying my encroaching madness. Because I truly believed that’s where I was: at the edge of madness. Janine was seven years in her grave, her perfume as fresh in my nostrils as ever. And now Laura was gone, stolen from me by the perverted followers of some god that had never and could never existed, her mind probably taken from her, twice removed from me. My memories of her were beginning to feel unfair. They should have been her thoughts, not mine. It seemed so wrong that I should have more recollections of my daughter’s life than she, had the brainwashing gone as far as I feared.

I fled the stares and snickers and found myself in an old preserved side-street, the cobbles shining with evening dampness. The gutters overflowed with litter, a drunk lay sleeping in a puddle of piss and vomit. I was way off the beaten track. Perhaps I’d been aiming here all along.

Nestled between the rear entrance of a smoke-filled pub’ and an unknown Chinese restaurant stood a door. It was clean and freshly painted, so out of place. A sign hung above it, looking so perfect, so appropriate, that I knew it was placed there just for me. The flush of warmth and peace mimicked what I would have felt had I found Laura herself, and for a few seconds I was sure, certain that everything was not going to be alright…. it already was.

Hell, it read. Calmed if you enter, damned if you don’t.

The door opened on frictionless hinges. The ground shifted beneath my feet to carry me into the room, and I felt as if I was flying towards my fate. I did nothing to prevent it. I was not afraid. I’d heard about Hell from drunken friends at the tail-end of parties and strangers in airports, and I knew it was the place for me. I needed a dose of misfortune. Things were bad for me, but so much worse for so many other people. I needed to be told this for sure.

I needed to see.

The room was certainly not what I’d expected, but I guessed as I entered that it was merely one of many portals into Hell. It was small, certainly not much larger than the average living room, with several chairs lining one wall and a huge holo-image projected against the wall opposite. It did not move, but it didn’t need to. It depicted a scene I remembered from my days as a teenager, a time when wars raged and the camps had just been discovered in North Africa. This image was taken from one of them. Dry desert. A few stick figures in the foreground, their skin as yellow as the sand, their eyes as dead. And in the background, like some false forest sprouting from the hot desert wastes, hundreds of stakes holding their dead offerings aloft. Desert wildlife, unused to such a proliferation of free food, had made its home amongst the bodies. Lizards fed on the coagulated blood at the bases of the stakes, while scorpions, beetles and flies feasted on the more recent dead. And the eyes of the wandering stick figures in the foreground… when I’d first seen this image twenty years before, I remembered thinking that they looked like they wanted to die. Now, seeing again, I knew how wrong I’d been. These people wanted to much to have never lived at all.

“Bet you’re glad you weren’t there.”

I spun around and was confronted by the most sensationally attractive woman I had ever seen. I hate to use to term ‘unnatural beauty’ — even then the phrase circled my consciousness like a ghost, too dangerous, too unknown to admit to — but if her beauty were natural, then the world was indeed a wonderful place.

“Er…” I said, glancing at the holo, then back to the woman.

“They were killed like that for their beliefs,” she said, face growing serious, her emerald-green eyes darkening as though she were seeing the scene for the first time. “There wasn’t enough wood to make full crosses, not enough nails to hold them up, so they sharpened the ends of the poles and set the people on them. Into their anuses to begin with, then as the killings went on the murderers became more experimental. One man was found weeks later with the spike through his lower jaw, protruding from his mouth. They say he died of dehydration and heat-stroke, his skin flayed by the sun, eyes removed by wandering carrion.” The woman looked at me again as if daring me to challenge what she had said. “Women suffered particularly terrible fates.”

I could say nothing.

She smiled gently, and even the lightest touch lit up her whole face. “But that was a long time ago, and it’s the here and now you’re concerned with, yes?”

I nodded. I felt crazily controlled by this woman, as if she was a teacher and I a young, snotty-nosed pupil. She turned and walked back to the comfortable chair she had been sitting in when I entered. It was a rocking chair, a small table beside it with a cup of steaming tea and a half read book lying face down.

“I need you,” I said. The intention was not sexual and she seemed to know that. My desperation was welling, the idea that I was nearer than I had ever thought possible — always, inside, was the niggling fear that Hell was just a myth, an urban legend — almost bringing me to tears. There was no shame behind my need, simply the knowledge that something had to be done. Right then, I was not prepared to go mad.

She stared up into my eyes. It felt as if she was viewing my soul, bare and helpless before her.

“Oh God, yes,” she said. “Yes you do.” She smiled again and asked me to take a seat.

I looked around as I crossed to the chairs. There was a tall rubber plant in one corner with pale spots on its leaves and dried roots showing through the powdery soil. There were more important things, I supposed. The gruesome holo of the impalings was the only hint at decoration. The chairs were comfortable-looking but functional, no ostentation here, no grand entrance to Hell. Simply a waiting room, and a woman whose like I would never see again.

I turned around, smiled at her and sat down.

The smile froze for an instant as I felt a stab in my left buttock. The woman’s calm expression did not change. She picked up her book, still smiling, and took a sip of tea. The room faded, seeming to dissolve away from me, the woman’s gentle smile remaining in my vision like a Cheshire Cat grin, and I imagined her whispering in my ear I thought it would. I tried to stand to see what had stung me, but before I could rise from the seat I found myself somewhere else entirely.

There.

A quiet suburban street. Cars parked along the side of the road, gardens well-maintained, privet hedges trimmed. The houses were all freshly painted, roofs newly tiled, lawns lush with grass of a constant length.

I was in a bus or coach, my seat so comfortable that it must have moulded to my form. The air in the coach