Or maybe you expect something soft—light, warmth, the cliché of an open gate. What you do not expect is to feel the weightless, perfect drift toward the stars. It is not a vision. It is direction. The current carries you upward into a black strewn with fire, and you know—without words—that this is the way home.
Then it happens.
It’s not an attack. It’s not even sudden. It’s a pressure from every side, like invisible hands kneading the air around you until you can’t move. The current falters. The light ahead flickers. And then you see it—a shadow deeper than space itself, a blot in the distance that swells and swells until it is everything.
You are inside it before you understand what it is.
No walls. No ceiling. No floor. Just an infinite interior of nothing that breathes. And there, suspended around you, are the others—hundreds, thousands, maybe millions—strung in midair like strands of glowing sinew. Their faces—if they had faces—are locked in shapes you wish you hadn’t recognized: pleading, straining, wide-eyed in the last instant before they were emptied.
The first pull is almost gentle.
Then it deepens.
It drags through you like a hand groping in your skull, curling around something you didn’t know you had until it was gripped. You feel it being pulled out—pure you, stripped raw, leaving only the ache behind. It slides away in ribbons, glowing for an instant before vanishing into the dark lattice above.
That’s when you hear it.
The hum.
It’s low, constant, inhuman. But as it builds, you start to recognize shapes in the sound—moans, shouts, screams, all blended together into one eternal note. It’s the engine. It’s the ship. It’s what they’ve made you into. Every stolen soul is another wire in its body, another voice in its dirge.
You don’t see the things that own this place, but you feel them everywhere, like the presence of a predator in a pitch-black room. They are older than the galaxies, older than the laws that govern them. And they do not hate you. They don’t even know you exist. You are not a prisoner here—you are consumable.
Time collapses. You cannot measure it. Your memories thin until they are more sensation than fact. You forget how your own voice sounded. You forget the color of the sky you were born under. You forget that there was ever anywhere else to be. The cold works its way inward, past the marrow of whatever you’ve become, until you no longer remember what warmth means.
And the most terrifying part?
You realize you are helping.
Every flicker of thought, every memory bleeding away, is one more spark driving the machine forward. You are making it move. You are part of it now, and the ship has no destination.
It will travel forever.
It will feed forever.
And long after the last star dies, long after the universe itself cools into nothing, you will still be here—emptied, forgotten, humming in the dark, helping something you cannot see cross a void that never ends.
The day of the ceremony had been nothing special at first. We drifted through the hours like smoke through the rafters, languid in the heat, barefoot in the dust. The horses dozed under the sagging beams of the stable, tails flicking lazily. The smell of sage from the hills mixed with the faint sourness of sweat and old hay. There was nothing to suggest that this was the day everything would end—nothing except Charlie’s silence.
He was quieter than usual, his eyes brighter but fixed on something far away. He spent most of the afternoon bent over in the yard, dragging his fingers through the dirt, shaping something. The rest of us gave it only half-interest at first, lying on the porch or fiddling with guitars. But as the hours stretched and the sun slid lower, I realized his work had taken on form: a spiral, wide enough for three people to stand inside, carved deep into the earth with grooves that caught the amber light like lines in a palm.
No one asked what it was. We didn’t have to. Charlie’s voice later, at the fire, would put a name to it—a door—but even before he spoke, there was an unspoken understanding. This was where we would pass through.
By the time dusk bled into night, the ranch had gathered around the fire. Bottles passed from hand to hand, wine warm from the heat of the day. Powder was poured into palms, tabs laid like communion wafers on the tongue, seeds chewed until the mouth was numb. The air thickened as the smoke from the fire mixed with the curling sweetness of whatever Charlie burned in an old coffee tin—something green and sharp, with a sweetness that clung to the back of the throat.
It began innocently, even sweetly. The girls moved first, swaying to a slow beat someone strummed on a guitar, hair falling in their faces, shadows playing across bare shoulders. There was a laughter in it, a kind of desert-born innocence, the kind that only survives if you’ve convinced yourself the rest of the world doesn’t exist. A few of the boys joined in, their movements loose, not yet tangled in lust.
But the powders blurred things faster than the wine could. Touches grew bolder, lips found lips without asking, fingers traced the lines of backs and hips with an urgency that didn’t belong to the moment. The music slowed to a lazy heartbeat. The spiral—meant to be sacred—drew us like moths. Feet stepped into its grooves, hands dragged through its carved lines, bodies pressed against each other inside its curves.
It was ecstasy without cruelty, naïveté without any thought of cost. Skin shone in the firelight, damp with heat, streaked with ash and green. I kissed a face I didn’t recognize, tasting wine and the faint bitterness of seeds. Someone wept in the middle of climax, and the sound was swallowed by a chant that had begun without anyone deciding to start it—a low, rolling sound, too deep for our own voices, yet somehow ours.
Charlie didn’t join the knot of bodies. He paced the spiral’s edge like a priest at an altar, whispering to the dirt, sprinkling pinches of powder into the grooves. The smoke that rose from them was unlike the fire’s—low, heavy, curling close to the ground, clinging to ankles before it spread outward like water. When one of the girls stumbled into the spiral’s center, gasping, he didn’t move to help her up. The groove cradled her body as if she belonged there.
We went on until the fire was low and the air was slick with heat. When we finally collapsed, tangled together on the ground, the spiral was still smoking faintly. Charlie’s last words before sleep were soft enough to feel more than hear: Tomorrow, we will be together forever.
Morning came like a held breath.
At first, everything seemed as it should. The light was pale, the air still. But it was a damp stillness, as if it had soaked up the residue of something rotting. The horses were silent, heads high, staring toward the fence. I saw it before I felt it—a small child, barefoot, hair hanging in front of its face, darting between the barn and the tree line. No one here had a child. And yet, the moment it vanished into the trees, I felt something inside me peel away. Not pain—just subtraction, as if a sliver of myself had been stolen and replaced with emptiness.
Far across the flats, a pack of wolves appeared. They ran in silence, fast but without urgency. As they passed, their heads turned in perfect unison toward us, eyes like wet stones. They were gone in moments, but the emptiness in my chest deepened, a hollow behind my ribs where something warm had once been.
From there, the wrongness unfolded slowly, almost politely. The fence posts seemed farther apart, though they stood where they always had. The shadows bent in strange directions, moving as if the light came from somewhere else. A crow cried overhead, the sound stretching far too long, lodging in my head until I couldn’t tell whether I was hearing it or thinking it. The wind shifted and carried the smell of ash—not from any fire, but the kind that pulls every hidden shame up into the light and holds it there.
We began to lose ourselves piece by piece. Not in the way you forget something, but in the way a word, repeated too often, loses its meaning. Memories faded at the edges, thoughts arrived that weren’t entirely ours. Looking into another’s eyes became dangerous, because in that instant, you’d feel their soul pressing against yours—and now they were all pressing together, layer on layer, no space between.
By afternoon, silence ruled the yard. We stood near one another but did not touch. Not because we didn’t want to, but because there was no difference anymore between touch and thought, between self and other. Privacy was gone. Solitude was gone. All that remained was the constant, suffocating nearness of every other soul, their hungers, their memories, their secrets grinding against your own.
We didn’t fall screaming. We didn’t burn. We simply stood there, understanding at last that the ceremony had worked—not to lift us into some promised forever, but to seal us into Satan’s love.
And his love was not warmth. His love was eternal closeness, soul pressed to soul, with no air, no separation, no end. A terror so pure it had no need for fire or chains—only the knowledge that in this place, you would never be alone again.
A day in hell is an orchestrated descent into chaos where all beliefs blend, yet none dominate. It’s a labyrinth of suffering, not confined to fire or brimstone, but an eternity spent dancing with the shadow of consequence. The day begins in silence—an eerie, ringing absence, echoing like the hollow core of despair. There are no flames licking at your feet, not yet; instead, it’s the unshakable knowing that you’ve been separated from the divine, from light, from hope, in a way that transcends the understanding of time.
In this realm, punishment is self-revelation. You face your deepest fears, your smallest guilts, repeated and magnified. Christian torment blends with karmic justice, but there’s no retribution, only an ever-evolving understanding of your failures. It’s not eternal torture, not in the physical sense—it is eternal awareness of what you could have been. You become Job, without the possibility of redemption, Sisyphus without the rock, tethered to your own insufficiency.
Hell is multi-dimensional. From the Qur’an’s Jahannam comes the searing reality of regret, where the flames are more like memories—searing hot flashes of every decision that could have led you to peace, but didn’t. But it’s not just heat. From the Buddhist and Hindu worlds, you inherit samsara, where you continuously relive moments of attachment and suffering, like falling through layers of your own unfinished desires. You feel as if you could break free, but as soon as you reach for escape, you are yanked back by your own want—trapped in your eternal loop.
The Jewish Gehenna finds its reflection in the space between: neither heaven nor earth, just the slow grind of purification, but it isn’t God doing the cleansing. It’s you, agonizingly aware of the filth on your soul, forever washing it off only to find more appearing.
At noon, it is hottest—mentally, emotionally. This is when the fire rains down, not just burning but erasing your sense of time. You think of hell as eternal, but in this day, eternity is compacted into every second, and it feels heavier than millennia. The screams of others, those lost with you, form a choir, but their voices echo in reverse, reverberating against your soul as you drown in shared guilt.
Hell’s afternoon is quiet, deadly so. The abyss reveals its most terrifying trait—it listens. The Hindu scriptures suggest a cosmic balance, but here, that balance is tipped. There is no harmony, no equilibrium, just an all-consuming void that devours any attempt to reconcile your past with your punishment. The more you try to reason with your suffering, the deeper the pit becomes.
By dusk, the evening turns colder, freezing your soul in Buddhist voidness, where emptiness doesn’t offer freedom, but rather a suffocating nothingness. It is the absence of self, stripped of any illusion of identity. From Zoroastrianism, a bridge appears, a false hope: it looks like the escape, the ascent back to life. But as you step onto it, it collapses under the weight of your sins, dropping you back into a whirlpool of your own making.
Night in hell? It doesn’t bring rest. Darkness falls, but it’s not the restful kind. It’s the culmination, where the flames flicker out and you’re left with a silence far worse than the fires—a silence where the only sound is the echo of your own thoughts, endlessly repeating.
By midnight, you no longer fear the pain; you fear the nothingness. Heaven isn’t a far-off dream—it is the light just out of reach, the thing that could have been.
