Welcome to my first and perhaps only Shawshank Redemption story.
Don't have that much interest in the movie (I frankly think it's overrated, sorry), but studying that movie throughout the whole year of 2016 as part of the Year 12 English Curriculum in New Zealand has given me a chance – whether I wanted it or not – to delve deep into the minds of its characters.
Basically, my line of thinking for movies is:
1. If it doesn't appeal to a general and broad audience, it isn't good enough in my eyes. That means anything R-rated is bad in my opinion, and M is pushing the boundary (though the film could still be great if executed effectively – the 2002 Spiderman for example).
2. If you can't care enough for the characters, why care for the movie at all. Case in point, look at HTTYD 1 – the majority of the characters were unlikable in my opinion, so in retrospect I now view the movie as highly overrated. Don't get me wrong, I know I have several HTTYD stories on my profile, but they're either original ideas, collaborations, or are completely taken from the second movie, HTTYD 2 – which in my opinion is the superior movie.
3. I view gratuitous sex and violence as outright bad. If it is not gratuitous or forced, then it has the potential to be good. But again, only if it is executed well.
But enough of me ranting, this Shawshank story focuses on Warden Norton's condemnation in the afterlife, 'cause he was such a jerkass m**********r villain that I feel the need to express his eternal suffering in words.
Be warned for nightmarish description discretion.
Took some delightful inspiration from one of Matthew Stover's best books. Some of you might get the hint straight away from the first line.
Now, enjoy. (I guess I could say that – in a perverted, twisted and darkened way…)
Damnation Lies Within
This is what it feels like to be Samuel Norton. Forever.
The first light of what comes after your Earthly life brings pain. First a bit, then it magnifies tenfold with each passing second. It looks like fire. It feels like fire. But it is far worse than just fire.
A fire, torturous as it is, dies out eventually, and new life has the opportunity to grow from the ashes that remain behind.
But not from this fire.
Because it is Hell's Fire.
It will burn you. It will always burn you.
There will be no respite for you.
You. A hypocrite. A scandal. A dictator. A murderer.
"Put your faith in the Lord. Your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank."
Those were the words that you used to welcome many men into your infernal pit. Whether they were innocent or guilty, pliant or obstinate, obedient or mutinous, honourable or disgusting.
Revolting and disgusting, you called them.
But so were you.
And so Satan, slowly tearing into your flesh with his scalding iron trident as you scream in agony that will never end, repeats to you those very words, with damning denigration.
"You never put your faith in the Lord. Well done to you. Your glorious reward? You belong to me – with me – forever."
When Satan is finished carving open your chest, he reverses his trident backwards. Hell's Fire continues to burn. Then, with no blinding flash to take away the fear, nor any state of unconsciousness to rob you of the smoking and bleeding misery, the Devil spears you with his trident through your wretched black heart.
You scream to the point where your burning ears go deaf, but the torment doesn't stop. It will never stop.
You screw your eyes shut to offer them useless protection against the flame, but the accursed smoke seeps in. Your despicable ways of life, your inhumane views on others – they are being called to the red, blazing light to be mocked at, jeered at, and spit at by the other souls who reside in this revolting hole of endless, forever, eternal torment.
When Satan is finished barbecuing you through your chest, he lets Hell's abhorrent beasts crawl and slug over your battered, searing, and smoking body. You are still awake. Immobile, but forever awake as they slash at you, hack at you, chew away at you, for what seems like hours. Days. Months. Years. Eons.
Time is too innocent to be trapped in here along with the likes of you.
All the faux substances you can ever eat and drink rip you up and melt you down from the inside out. Thorns riveting themselves deep down into the roots of your impious tongue, and along the damned hollow tubes of your throat – which you used in your fleeting gift of mortality to bellow curses, pass death sentences and permit visceral damage upon others. You'll never speak again. You are only left to agonizingly wallow in your silently screaming, silently pleading thoughts.
Whatever the hell you drink tastes a thousandfold fouler than acid. What was left of your organs is now decimated and dissolved, leaving only the charred and blackened remains of the outer husk of your body. But you are still conscious, never allowed to even fall into an eternal and solitary coma – still a forever condemning fate but to you, right here, right now, is a much more preferable fate. But all the demons and the Devil do is laugh at you as you are denied even that. Their shrieking laughs somehow yet bring even more pain to your ravaged and agonized senses, but you can't stop it. You will never be able to stop it. Never.
Even as your body crumples to irradiated dust and ashes, in merely a moment every particle of you is painfully stitched up again and rebuilt – all so that the tormenting cycle can begin again. Forever.
As your body finishes its tortured reconstruction, and Hell's Fire and Smoke begins to devour you once again, you manage to force through your slipping mind one last epiphany.
All of this was all you. Salvation lies within, you said to DuFresne. But what also lies within yourself, within the deepest and darkest reaches of your soul, are the seeds of your own damnation.
Your choices in your Earthly life planted those seeds. And with the rain of years gone by, they sprouted as you nourished them with your wickedness. Eventually they grew to the point where they overwhelmed and suffocated your morality. And eventually, your soul.
You let evil control your life, and now you realize this as it all comes back to crash down upon your darkened and doomed spirit. The futile realization comes down upon you with multitudes of endless blows, many times more excruciating than the ones you and your guards administered amongst the prisoners, the ones which you called the Scum of the Earth. The ones that you were content and joyful to let them bleed out to death in whatever way, slowly and painfully, or devastatingly swift. It didn't matter, you were their god.
You were their god. A cruel and smiling god, now damned for all eternity.
You realize now, far too late, that your endless suffering is your own bloody doing, and there is nothing you can do now to stop it.
You are despicable.
You are evil.
And you are now in Hell.
A place where the love of the one, true God burns everything and everyone set against it.
And that includes you. You twisted, vile person.
You disgusting, evil vermin.
You are the Scum of All Existence.
So enjoy your one-way ticket to a permanent stay in Satan's burning and damning and ceaselessly tormenting prison.
You are never. Ever. Getting. Out.
That is what it feels like to be Samuel Norton.
Forever…
How was that?
Bloody hellish?
Ghoulishly nightmarish?
You can consider that a late Halloween present.
Please leave your feelings about this story in a review.
I'd love to know what you thought about my horrific oneshot!
Gee, now I sound disturbingly mortifying…
Transformers 0 over the moon and out!