I wrote this in two days. Nonstop. Did not edit. Be nice. We need more threads. >______>;
For an OC contest on deviantArt. My page.... needs views.... and yeah. Read the stupid thing:
One.
I am Reizn. That’s what I’m called now, since I can’t remember my name. I was normal. Perfectly normal. A kind and understanding young man of eighteen, barely ready to set out for the world. Then She came along and shook my world. I can’t remember Her name or face anymore, as is the way of Hell. It makes you forget everything you held close to you in your time of living. She whispered about it before, when She was still haunting me.
She wasn’t always a ghost. I wasn’t always eternally damned. The hazier parts of my memory remind me that we were both humans once. Normal. Perfectly normal. My life. Before.
I sighed as I boarded the train. The memories of what had happened two nights before bothered me. We’d fought, for the first time. She hadn’t taken it well. I’d had to leave earlier than expected. All for a stupid little call from my mother, who had wanted me to be there for her second anniversary. Wasn’t she too old to get remarried? I’d thought that when I was thirteen. But it happened, again and again. Always to a man I didn’t know.
That wasn’t important, though. What mattered to me was what my departure had caused. She hadn’t wanted me to go. She wouldn’t tell me why, but She was against my leaving. We’d fought…. A coldness enveloped my chest.
Several hours later, I was home again. Standing outside the house, looking up at the window of our bedroom. Something wasn’t right. It was only eight in the evening, but the lights were off. With a feeling of dread, I walked to the door and opened it. It was unlocked, just as I had left it three days ago. Why? What happened?
I flipped on the switch by the door as I walked in, locking the door. The lights flickered into sight, illuminating the entire hallway with a soft, dreary glow. I stumbled forward, blanching at a strange, metallic reek. Must have been the metalware, left in the sink again. Beginning to rust…. In fact, I could hear the faucet dripping. I walked toward the kitchen, queasy at the smell. Rounded the corner….
Nothing. Nothing would have ever prepared me for what I saw. The bloodiest gore movies, the most gruesome images of inane mutilation.
I remember the blood. The ex-crimson, then-browned mess of life that splattered the walls, furniture and floor. I remember stepping toward Her, slipping on a small piece of something. Looking down, I saw Her finger. The finger on the hand that had never had the chance to wear the ring I bought two weeks before. The hand itself…. Detached from the rest of the body.
I cried. Like a stupid child, I cried over her body for minutes, hours, days. I cleaned the blood from her with my shirt, not wanting to leave her side again for even a minute. Crying as I did so. On the second day, I began to feel another person in the room. I didn’t look up, didn’t talk to them. I told Her all the things I never had the chance to say. I held Her hand, I sang to Her. By the third day, I was becoming delirious with exhaustion and more irritated by the other person in the room. Couldn’t they see that I wanted to be alone? Alone. She was alone. Alone, on the other side, without me. What if I went to find her? To find Her on the other side? The question pounded in my head.
I eagerly pulled open the knife drawer. Together again in death. “Don’t do that yet,” a familiar voice emanated from the other mourner. I froze in shock, whipping around to look at the person for the first time. The person was not a person. The not-person was not a mourner. She smiled at me through translucent, blue, lifeless lips.
She had come back to tell me all the things She had never said. She’d heard my words. After She told me Hers, She proceeded to torment me and sadden me. After I rested up and called the police, I realized how insane the idea of killing myself was. Only crazy people did that….
Two months later, She whispered the same words I had thought the night I discovered Her body. “Come on…. Why don’t you follow me over? We’ll live together again. We’ll be together….” And I had obeyed. It was my fault I put myself to sleep. My fault.
My fault. My fault I went down to the basement to grab the gun. My fault I wrote to my mother, telling her and the Man-I-Didn’t-Know of my death. My fault I mailed the letter, my fault I went back to the house. My fault I looked around at the kitchen where She had died, the living room where She had read, the bedroom where She had slept. My fault I lay down on the bed, my fault I put the gun to my head. My fault I said her name before I pulled the trigger.
My fault I didn’t know that none of this would matter the second I set foot in Hell.
Two.
I was normal. Perfectly normal. Perhaps it was that perfection of normality that caused the irregularity. Normally, people were changed upon arrival in Hell.
Normally. Normal. What does that word even mean? I don’t know anymore.
My first impression of the afterlife was that it was incredibly dark. There wasn’t anything. No gravity, no light, no matter. It was like floating in space with your senses turned off.
Like dying in space.
In space, I died for days, years, minutes. What was time? When was time? In the nothingness, I didn’t know.
Then I felt a prickling in my head. I saw my life again, in perfect clarity. It sped forward, and it played for one last time. I remember enjoying some of the memories as they played; the second I thought of them again, they disappeared.
I was losing my life.
I screamed a silent scream through silent lips. “What is this?” Of course, the words only rang in my mind. They were never heard.
How was I to know that the destruction of my most cherished thoughts and memories was the beginning of the end of my living? My induction into Hell.
By the time I put the gun to my head again, I had stopped feeling. By the time I pulled the trigger again, I was gone. I had nothing left. I was a shell, an empty shell with no spirit or memories.
There’s so much I don’t know now.
Three.
I met the devil.
He wasn’t as terrifying as people have thought. True, he could change. When I first saw him, he was a leopard. When I saw him again, he was a human man who wore a suit and tie.
But I feared him all the same. Maybe it was because he was the one who brought me out of the darkness, slowly and painfully.
The pulling began at my hair. Like every single strand was being yanked out individually. The sensation spread to the top of my head, then my eyes. All the while, the pain was unimaginable. Like every part of me was coming apart in violent explosions. Like I was being pulled apart in several different directions. By the time the pain reached my neck, I couldn’t take it anymore. I screamed, my throat hoarse from disuse. I stopped when I realized that I could hear. I could hear again. My senses were functional.
I was not sure whether to be terrified or grateful. The sense of feeling…. I wanted the pain to go away.
It didn’t. What was wrong? Wasn’t everything supposed to end? What was this?
The pain never did stop. That’s Hell. The second the devil pulls you in, you’re subjugated to an eternity of endless suffering.
Again, I’ll say this: I was normal. So incredibly normal. What had made me different from all the other damned? My damned perfect normality.
The devil himself has a name. It is not Lucifer. “Lucifer” is simply the closest you can get to pronouncing it in this tongue. His name, when spoken, contains the very definition of sin. You hear it, and you know. Just like you know to obey when he commands you.
“Up.” I felt my body moving of its own accord.
”You have suffered.” I nodded my head. What…. Was I doing?
”I offer you a deal that I do not offer to every human.” I nodded again, mindless. I had no control over myself anymore. Wasn’t it common sense to not ever agree to anything offered to you by the devil?
”You will become like me. You will go back to Mortalle Earth and see the truth. Understand the sin of your kind. You will replace me.”
I choked. Good. I still had a small amount of control over my own body. But WHAT WAS THIS? Was it a trick? Why would I have to replace him? What had I done?
I did not have enough control to stop myself from nodding again. A weight fell on my chest. The deal was done. The one-sided deal that I would never have agreed to if I were still sane.
Was I still sane? Am I sane now?
Four.
Back to Earth.
“Mortalle Earth” as the devil called it. I don’t care. Earth is my Earth. Earth is my home.
Was. Isn’t anymore.
I signed the Devil’s Contract.
Hell is my home now. I don’t have any other place I can call home.
I spent my first few years at “home” being tested. I didn’t know what for. He would cut into my mind every day, checking, checking, and checking again. I didn’t care. I didn’t know what was in there myself, so I didn’t care.
Not caring. Ironic. Now I know that he chose me to be his successor because I cared.
The rules. He burned the rules into my skin. Rather literally.
“Are there rules to this?” The question I now regret.
“Of course.” He touches my left shoulder with the index finger of his right hand. Instantly, I felt the pain. I twisted my head to look at my shoulder, now burning with hellish fire. The flames carve intricate lines into my skin, around my arms, around my stomach. The lines all extend to the center of my left breast, where an eight-pointed star begins to draw itself.
“It’s hard to break the rules when they’re engraved in your skin, Reizn.”
Now understand. Pain was not new to me. I was constantly feeling the effects of Hell, of being pulled apart. The fact that I could still feel the fire…. It would have killed me if I were still human. And it would have, he explained. So you could die twice.
I examined the businessman who sat on the other side of the cafe, unaware. To him, I was just another eccentric young man. He couldn’t possibly know that his sins were about to be judged. I pulled at the black string of the necklace around my neck…. The necklace from which dangled a single black loop.
I removed the circle from the string and stuck my smallest finger through the middle. My finger vanished the second it when through, hooking at something on the other side. With it, I pulled out a square of paper, folded multiple times. There was a hole in the middle.
I held the paper in front of my right eye. I already knew my iris was glowing with an unusual silver sheen. I no longer stopped to check. Within seconds, the man’s entire life story was written down on the paper. All the good, all the bad. The way he was going, a lifetime in Hell was almost guaranteed. It was up to me to determine the severity…. A worrisome task.
That’s what I do now. I wander the Mortalle Earth, judging the sins of those who are not yet damned. Until the day the devil decides that I am worthy of taking his position.
There’s still much he hasn’t showed me yet. The Unmortalle Earth, the Dead Earth. All that I’ve heard about, and there’s still so much more….
It no longer bothers me that I don’t know about my living period.
I no longer care about Her, although She still follows me.
Until the rest of eternity.
Word count: 2091. In TWO DAYS. My god. x____x;