He had never really thought about what might happen after he died. Heaven, hell…these things were for mortal men, superstitious, cowering, impotent fools who believed in the inevitability of death just like they believed in love and in each other.
Long, long ago, when he was a frail, dirty child, he asked Mrs. Cole, the woman who ran the orphanage, where his mother and father were, and she simply told him they were dead and that he should try not to think of it too much. But he lay awake trembling night after night, imagining that formless dark which would inevitably seize him. It was impenetrable, unknowable, just like his parents, just like his "caretakers" (even as a five-year-old, Tom Riddle was well-acquainted with irony and wore it like armor) and the other rotten little bastards that surrounded him and pestered and teased him. He could not see anything beneath their cruel masks and he believed them to be filled with the dark void.
He swore later that he would become unknowable and beat the void by becoming it. He decided that there would be no after to his life.
God, what a bloody idiot he was.
He had meticulously divided his soul seven ways, but that little boy had fused it back together without even knowing it, without even trying…or maybe Voldemort had himself. Technically, he'd killed himself, when you really thought about it. So, there was that. He held close this very small consolation, which meant to him that he had not truly been bested in the end.
It turned out he actually had been quite evil (another concept he previously presumed to be superstition). Who could've known? Of course he would go to Hell. That's what the void was. But there were no flames, no red scaly demons. That wouldn't have been so bad, really. That, he could have dealt with that.