Perdition in Judgement
There's a certain look in your eyes that has been nagging me for the past few minutes. I stop speaking and look at you, your eyes quickly dropping to the chair I sit on. All of a sudden you seem far more interested in my trainers than the story trying to force its way through my pursed lips. Eventually you lift your head again and catch my eye for a moment, prompting me to speak up before you drift away again. "Something wrong?" You shake your head, your eyes distant and your teeth absently scraping along the skin of your finger. I reach out, taking your hand from your mouth and smiling calmly before sitting back again and sighing. "What did I tell you about that?" Your eyes drop to my trainers again, mine drift over to the two levers that sit in the wall beside us. You look pensive, almost wistful. "Mmm.. what was I talking about?" Of course I know exactly the word I'd stopped on but I'm hoping for you to at least say something to me. I stare at your distracted eyes for a few seconds more as I try to glean any sort of hint as to what's troubling you. Nothing but nothing but nothing. I sigh again, exaggeratedly, falling back into the welcoming chaise longue and making a real show of stretching and resting my eyes. Naturally, I only intend to rest my eyes.
I wake up to a much darker room, my vision filled with your darkened face as you stare intently at my pseudo-sleeping face. "Mitä?" I mumble, conscious of my own slurred voice. You jump, settling back into your chair and looking convincingly disinterested. Were it not for the fact I just saw you watching me, I would believe it. "What's the matter? If there's something that's bothering you just come out with it now. I'm not carrying on until you tell me." I swing my legs around to sit on the edge of the chair, your head lifting with a great effort to look, finally, straight into my eyes as you earnestly tell me what you're thinking. You think I'm crazy. My talking about what happened in Alchemilla has you worried. Not only do you think I'm hallucinating, you think you know why. I've been under a lot of stress lately and my condition just reacted badly to it. I brush a stray strand of hair out of my eye and fix you with a calm gaze. "I think you're crazy," I'm trying to appear as composed as possible. The guys in the white coats could come bursting in through the door at any minute, were they to exist. You looked away first. I won. "Do you want me to carry on or not?" You gesture with your hand, the selfsame worry settling itself deep into your frown lines. "Are you sitting comfortably?" A quick glance at me and your eyes fall back to my trainers. "Then I'll begin."
I wouldn't class you as the type to be interested in religion. You're all science, really. For you it's all about facts and evidence. Since you don't have any facts or evidence in your hands, your logic tells you that none of it can exist. I was the same, yet completely different. See, it takes a certain sort of person to really be understanding about that sort of thing. We go about our daily lives, cursing the world when we drop a book into a puddle or someone steals our taxi. We wonder how a God could possibly exist when such awful, awful tragedies are allowed to befall us. I suppose you could call it ignorance, or maybe laziness. We'll willingly accept how small we are and end up a Nihilist but we find it so hard to imagine something as big as God really existing. We have no proof, therefore it doesn't exist. You accept that the other side of the world exists because you're presented with evidence: videos, pictures and any scrap of culture that is apparently from some other country. I'm not criticizing you. Well, I am. Only I'm criticizing myself too. I was the type to laugh at the preaching fanatics on street corners and the bothersome preachers that turned up on my doorstep and tried to persuade me out of my ways. I still am, actually. A veritable change has come over me since I last talked to you, however. The empty space in me that I filled with self-belief and passive arrogance left much to be desired. I wasn't content, had no meaning or no motivation. Sure, I had a job but really that simply provides an excuse. There's a certain sort of rebuke we have for those without enthusiasm or a purpose. I had neither. I'd gotten bored and had come to be a very judgemental person. I'd sit on my bench and be a personality critic. That person was snotty, aggressive, rude or arrogant. I'd be able to tell through sheer experience. Clothes and body language say a lot about a person. Though you should know, being a psychiatrist. But the change happened while I was in that town. I think it was planned to happen quite early on but I was blind to the message thrown in my face on a neon sign. Their first efforts were effective, no doubt. Something was planted in me and it grew and grew inside of me until I became who you see me as now. I still don't believe in your God, the one you pray to when you want something but otherwise ignore. I still despise street corner preachers and would be irritated by Jehovah's Witnesses if I had a front door for them to dirty. Sorry, I'm not meant to sway your decision, only tell the facts... give evidence.
It had only been a few minutes since we'd left Alchemilla. Though my stranger seemed to be coping well, I was still in shock. Through the few words exchanged between us, I learned that what we had been chased by was "of some sort of supernatural origin," to which I answered only with a blank look. I certainly didn't believe him but I had very little else in the way of an explanation. I'd never heard a human make the sorts of noises they did. On top of that, the town seemed to exude a certain sort of supernatural aura of its own, regardless of its inhabitants. I was a sceptical person, though. Rather than cause an argument or make him feel foolish, I said nothing.
The hospital, Alchemilla, was apparently converted into a mental asylum after a period of time functioning as a normal hospital. Patients came and went until a disaster happened and it shut down. It reopened not long ago as an asylum but seemed to have lost that purpose too. Either that or the patients walked the corridors. I didn't really care so long as we were out, so took the stranger's trivia as the truth. We walked together, his stride considerably shortened to make up for my stature. I stared at the floor, attempting to shut out the dim light that seeped into my eyes and as a result, unintentionally appearing antisocial. The stranger repeatedly attempted to engage in conversation but I just wasn't in the mood. He was rustling what sounded like a large piece of paper. The fog was oppressive and pushed in any and all noise we made. It felt as if we were carrying our own bubble of air with us as we walked. It was easy to see for a few inches before reaching the fog's borders. Everything after that became increasingly hazy and eventually faded into an enveloping grey. We were considerably safer in our portable bubble and, were it not for the awkward lack of communication between us, I would have been standing closer to the stranger. Over time my eyes began to complain less, the light becoming less bothersome. It was getting darker. "It's getting darker," came the echo of my own mind from my side. Startled, I looked up to the sky, then to the stranger.
"You're right," came out rather more hoarse than I'd intended.
"We should get inside. This isn't the place to be at night time." I looked around hesitantly, inside which he found something amusing, and laughed. "Yeah. Not right now, we still have a little while. C'mon, this way." He looked at the piece of paper, which I guessed was a map, one last time before folding it up and putting it back into his bag. A crossroads stood before us as he stopped to steady his bag and slide the map in. It was absolutely full, though I had no idea what of. That done, he nodded towards the left turn and walked away at his natural pace. I walked after him in long strides, occasionally breaking into a self-conscious run whenever I fell behind. We rounded corners and cut through alleys, followed main roads like rivers in the mountains and passed obscured side streets. Eventually we came to an abrupt end in the road. The tarmac was cracked long before the severance of the road, at which point it simply stopped.
The open air stood between two sheer rock faces, the other side barely visible through the haze. The stranger walked towards the trench in the ground and leaned against a building at its side, stretching out his neck to see along the line with his hands firmly planted on the wall. Naturally, my curiosity was aroused, and I stepped forwards. I planted my foot on the edge of the chasm and peered around the buildings whose revealed interiors bled out into the air. The precipice went on as far as my blurred and suppressed vision could see; it was sheer and endless.
I leaned out further in an effort to see around a piece debris that clung fruitlessly to an outcrop in the crumbling building. As I did so, I passed the point where my feet could manage to hold me up, and slipped. I let out an undignified yelp as I felt my top half lean past the reach of my lower half and begin its fall into the open air. My hands flailed, as they do in a state of helplessness, in the air before my head, only to be grabbed unceremoniously and yanked from it by a pair of large hands. I felt the cracked tarmac under my feet crumble away just as the stranger pulled on my wrists with an overwhelming force. I then fell forwards, my feet barely remaining on the edge of the crumbling crevasse as my top half fell back around and into the chest of the stranger. The tarmac beneath the stranger's feet was now giving way as he planted his feet firmly on the ground. Seeing this, I tried to remove my hands from his grip to push him backwards but, failing that, simply threw myself at him. We both fell backwards as a result of his own overcompensation and my effort to move him. We fell sidelong into the safety of the street and were only stopped when he hit a wall, and I hit his chest once more. It all happened in less than a few seconds but we stood there for many more, afraid to move should the ground have another attempt at our lives. I regained my breath, opening my eyes and only then seeing the compromising position we stood in. I threw myself back on an impulse, redirecting myself away from the edge at the last minute and stammering out a rushed apology. A grin had spread its way across his lips and stuck there. He stood somewhere in the course of my apology and his regaining of composure, gesturing with his hands and shaking his head. "Forget it, it's fine. I hardly noticed, honestly. Stop apologizing. It's fine. Look, it's fine. Seriously, stop." The last repetition sounded mildly irritated, so I did as I was told and stopped. The thought to apologise for apologizing crossed my mind but I ignored it. He gestured again, this time to an alleyway that was barely visible in the darkened fog. The light was failing, turning our surroundings darker by the second and turning the fog itself invisible. Now it just looked like darkness with substance.
And so we set off again, my head turning the possibility of a bottomless pit around and around, trying to find a side of it that made sense and finding none. I had little brain power spared for thinking it through as we hurried, faster and faster, towards a destination I hoped we had. Eventually it became too dark to see, forcing the stranger to light a flare. He urged me to "look away or cover your eyes or something" before the world was lit up with the same monochromatic light that sat in the bucket in Alchemilla. I walked with my head fixed firmly on the ground as the parasites that hissed from the flare tried to work their way back into my head again. It was difficult to walk in that manner but I managed, refusing many an offered hand along the way.
I was well into my stride and ready to walk forever when the stranger stopped, turning to grab me and stop me in my tracks. Doing so brought the flare right under my nose and turned the world white. Pain flared up again, spreading like wild fire through my head as the parasites happily forced their way behind my eyes. I can't recreate the manner of noise I make without you actually doing that to me, which I don't advise in your situation. Just know that it hurts, more than I can manage to explain to someone like you. Needless to say, I was disabled as a multitude of unearthly noises sprung up both near and far away. I paid little attention to them, only barely noticing as I was lifted from my curled position on the floor and carried out of the cold air. I heard a door shut and something slide into place as a series of metallic clangs sounded out, sharply defined and forceful. They faded away to leave only a strange, scared whimpering sound. I made sure it wasn't me making the noise as the red light faded and I re-opened my eyes to the stranger's concerned face. His eyes poured out a million apologies while a finger on his lips kept them in. He gestured down the hallway and apologetically pulled me to my feet. I swayed, his hands resting on my waist as he held me steady. I frowned and pushed away his hands, unsure what to be angry about, or whether to be angry at all. A look towards where he had gestured showed a long corridor that ended in a strange light and a glass box, in which sat the source of the whimpering.
I'd regained my balance and we both now walked down the hallway. It was upholstered with an expensive-looking red material, display lights protruding from the walls and bending down to illuminate their own supports. I would have mistaken it for a museum or an art gallery, and would probably not have been mistaken at all. The "exhibits", so to speak, contained something I'd hope never to see in a museum. The first enclosure held a woman, hanged haphazardly from the ceiling by a makeshift noose. A chair was kicked out from below her feet. She still swung steadily as if she had only just fallen, a perfect arc giving the dead woman's decaying corpse a sick sort of grace. She was in what looked like a living room of a typical house. Pictures lined the walls and cabinets, all pictures including her and what I suspected to be her family. A grown man, herself, a little girl and another person were present in them all, occasionally with the addition of a pet. What struck me was that the last person's face was missing in each of the pictures. In some, it was scribbled out, others cut out and in some simply torn from the paper altogether. The woman's hand held a photograph and a thick black marker, even after death. Though it was naturally disturbing to see a woman hanged in such a way, her expression was the most unsettling. She stared an empty stare, full of accusation, towards a portrait that displayed what I guessed to be the faceless individual. I guessed it to be a graduation photo, a smile and mortarboard to match shone out from the arrogant expression that the man held. The more I studied the woman's face, the greater the sense of grief and accusation I got from the condemning woman who stared towards the picture. It was a sort of reluctant hatred. Like one mistreated by a loved one too endeared to be willingly angry at. I turned away, my eyes the last to leave the scene as I moved on, this time crossing the corridor and the path of the stranger to peer into another enclosure.
This display showed an apartment that had been ransacked. A huge array of equipment, papers, electronics and other objects lay scatted before opened draws. A bed lay in the corner, under an open window, on which lay a naked woman. She lay on brown covers, stained by the crust of her own blood that coated her hands, chin and stomach. Her abdomen lay open, a vicious gash leaving her skin clinging haphazardly to her darkened insides from which rose a mess of red, tubular tissue that stretched up into her open palms. She held them in her hands, staring through bruised eyes at her own insides that hung loosely from her fingers. Strands of tissue fell from her fingers and dressed her bloodied sides in grotesque ribbons. On her face was a look of shock and surprise that hinted at a similarly condemning betrayal and pain. I felt my gorge rise as I turned away, feeling almost forced to make my way to the next display with my hand held firmly over my mouth. The stranger walked with me now, as curious and hopefully repulsed as I as he came to stand behind me.
In this enclosure there sat a man, kneeling over what I guessed to be a woman since I could only see a pair of feminine legs. The man had her blood on his hands. His face was distraught, tears pouring from his helpless eyes. They were both dead in reality, yet the man appeared to be very alive, a polar opposite of the woman that lay in a half-obscured pool of her own blood. They were in what looked like a department store; an assortment of food products lined shelves along the display and at the front end, where the man knelt, lay an open cash register that was stripped bare. I frowned, unable to discern anything more and moved to the next display, followed closely by the stranger.
The fourth and final display showed a man and little girl, both dressed in rags, lying on a park bench. Whether sleeping or dead, their conditions were awful; an array of discarded items of clothing and material were forced together into a flimsy patchwork blanket, a hat sitting on the floor with a few coins mockingly sitting in its base. I recognized their faces, though both dirtied and greatly malnourished. I rushed back to the first display, the stranger striding after me uncertainly as I looked once more at the photographs. The father and daughter in each photograph shared the same faces as those in the last display. I walked back and forth several times to check, each time blocking out the more disturbing aspects of each of the enclosures. I was sure of it, they were the same people. That meant they were of the same family. I wasn't sure where the murdered women or graduated man fitted into the story but the woman, man and daughter were a family. I sighed, offering a meagre sort of half-serious apology in my own head before walking away, unsure of how to react. I walked towards the strange end of the corridor, the displays ceasing to fill the walls and allowing the red fabric to line them instead. On nearing the box in which the figure sat, I came across a red rope that stretched across the corridor between two gold-tipped posts. It was a cordon, on which hung a sign:
In the beginning people had nothing,
Their bodies ached and their hearts held nothing but hatred.
They fought endlessly but death never came
They despaired, stuck in the eternal quagmire
I raised an eyebrow, turning to the stranger who stood beside me in a silent query. He wasn't looking at me, however, and instead stared at the box. I followed his gaze and saw a figure slouched in the corner, whimpering to himself. A voice came as I looked up, to a side of the box that was obscured by the walls:
"Your penance shows nothing... nothing but your own willingness to spout meaningless promises in the face of your own rebuttal. You have learned nothing." The voice was low, steady and cold. The man inside the box growled, standing and throwing himself against the glass, shouting:
"What do you know? Huh? You're nothing! You don't know shit!" He threw himself away from the box, falling against the side that faced us. "You! Help! P-please! Help me!" Through the dirt and injury, I recognized him. He was the graduated boy. His face had aged, but was of the same nature. He was the one cut from all of the photographs.
"It's him. He did all this," the stranger tilted his head to look sidelong at me as he spoke. His eyes looked fiercely emotional in the artificial light. He had been visibly affected by this, and now viewed the man in the box with an unaffected hatred. I was taken aback by the ferocity of his stare, the way it spread from his eyes and lit up his face... I shook my head. What did I care how he looked? Why did I care now, though? He turned away from me and looked back to the imprisoned man. "He deserves whatever's coming to him." I frowned, his expression still in my mind's eye while the prisoner was in my real eyes. The corridor, then, was a display of the man's crimes. It seemed he'd pulled apart his family, robbing a grocery store and doing something I hated to dwell on to the brutalized woman. His mother had killed herself and his father and sister had been forced onto the streets as a result. I felt a similar sort of hatred towards him, but fought against allowing it to consume me. I didn't believe in pure evil and always tried to find some sort of forgiveness over retribution.
"I know all about you. You've told me all you have to tell and now all your crimes are laid out before you. Do you really think this would go unpunished?" Came the cold voice again, the owner of it now stepping out into view in front of the box. He was tall, at least seven feet or so. He wore a long, black coat and jeans. I was expecting a sort of robe, coming from such a voice. His hair was black, too, and stuck up. If anything he looked like a member of a biker gang. He gestured flamboyantly to the corridors around him and rested his hands on something before him. "See this? This is what decides your fate." He made to interact with whatever was in front of him, causing the prisoner to jump back to the sides of the box and shout:
"No! No! Please, I'm begging you. I'll do anything! I'm sorry... I didn't mean to... I didn't... didn't mean..." He broke down into mindless whimpering before the threat under the hands of the casually dressed man outside the box. I looked up at the stranger;
"What's..."
"I don't know," he interrupted with his voice hushed, seemingly in awe rather than fear. "Looked like two buttons or something." Two buttons? What did they do? The man outside the box, who I now know was a judge, jury and executioner, spoke out after a short pause filled only with the prisoner's whimpers:
"Then it's settled." He reached out his right hand, the prisoner's eyes lighting up at the same moment.
"Thank you! Thank you! Th-" The judge cut him off mid-sentence, pulling his left arm back and being answered by a grinding of something mechanical behind the scenes. The floor that the prisoner stood on moved out from under him, a metallic grinding following it, accompanied by his pained screams. Blood flew up to coat the walls of the box, the prisoner's screaming being drowned out by the screeching of metal and the resulting sputtering as it worked to keep spinning against his body. The screams stopped somewhat abruptly as the doors closed again, the grinding ceasing and the executioner tutting almost dismissively.
"And why are you two in here?" His head snapped around to fix us with an angry stare. "Run along children! Or I'll grind you all up!" He laughed, maniacally, as my stranger turned, grabbing my hand and pulling me away. This time he ran faster than our flight out of Alchemilla, dragging me stumbling behind him as my head span in light of everything that happened.
We burst through the doors of the "museum" and out into the street, into the darkness and away from that place.