Dark Place

Stop.

Stop.

Please stop. Don't do this. Please don't do this.

He couldn't hear any of them. Maybe he couldn't hear it, maybe he chose not to. He couldn't hear the frantic voices surrounding him on all sides-he couldn't hear the pleading, couldn't feel the hands tightly grasping his arms and pulling with all their might. A number of his deceased classmates, many of whom he hadn't had any contact with in some time, tightly wrung his arms.

It didn't matter that he hadn't spoken with them often, or that they never seemed to care for him that much. He was still a good kid. He didn't deserve something like this. Nobody did.

His aunts, uncles, grandparents, and a few of his late idols slapped and beat him-or at least tried. Their hands just passed through him like air. He might feel a bit of a draft, but nothing more.

Goddamn you. What the fuck do you think you're doing? We taught you better than this... we taught you better!

They had been with him all his life, cheering him on in the good times and doing their best to comfort him. They gave him his privacy when he indulged in some of his... more eccentric appetites. Nothing he could ever do would sully their image of him. In life and death alike, they had watched him grow from a darling young child to a happy, outgoing young man with a lot of promise.

But this was different. He was going to lose everything if they couldn't get to him somehow. Hit him, drop something on him, make some noise and get his father to come check on him, anything to keep him from this,

Everyone in the room, relatives, friends, and acquantences alike, started to cry. It was painful to see him like this. It was agonizing to see him in so much pain, and over nothing, at that.

Despite his best efforts, he'd always been a little eccentric. It endeared him to some people, but it caused him some trouble as well. He had irresponsible tendencies that made him fall behind in school. He was a bit loud when he told his jokes, and it began to get on some people's nerves. He had a really short temper, and it caused him to do bad things. He destroyed and damaged. He yelled. He hurt. He endangered.

He had flaws. Who didn't? It wasn't like a few trips to the therapist wouldn't help him to improve on these flaws and get back on the path to becoming a socially acceptable young man. But he saw his flaws as deep and horrible stains on his psyche that no therapist, no matter how skilled, could remove. He saw himself as a broken person who would only hurt everyone around him, and tonight, he had decided that a few moments of pain for his loved ones would be far better than an entire lifetime of it.

He decided that another troubled kid throwing his life away would be far better than another wife beater or serial murderer in the world.

Poor, stupid, naive kid. If only he knew what he would have become.

If only he could see where he was going.

The pleading became more tearful and more frantic as he fought to stifle his animalistic sobbing long enough to tear open the numerous packets of sleep aids, tiny blue pills forming an increasingly large pile on his desktop. The invisible figures tried to swat the pills out of his hand, but to no avail-he popped them all into his mouth in one deft movement and slugged them all down with a few gulps of whiskey.

You stupid fuck. Do you realize what you've done to yourself?

He slugged down half the bottle, despite his body's protests... his esophagus convulsed violently in a vain attempt to force the poison out of his body and back onto the desktop. Moaning loudly in pain, he clutched a hand to his chest as he tightly clenched his esophagus, forcing the terribly bitter fluid to stay in place in his stomach. His head began to loll freely about on his shoulders, and his eyes began to glaze... it was already starting to take effect.

It was too late now. Collapsing in defeat one by one, the figures began to sob bitterly. Many of them had to turn away... they knew what was coming. It was just like the first time he had tried this, but without enough pills or liquor. The spiders began to appear again... just three at first, then ten, then twenty, then a hundred. They began to pour out of the walls, over his bare feet, under the layer of denim and over his legs, even into his open mouth as he tried to scream. He managed only a few bloodcurdling shrieks before he collapsed to the ground and began to cough violently, hands clasped tightly around his throat.

For a moment, he could see the figures in the room... the drugs clouded his perception of them, and he saw them instead as grotesque banshees, shrieking arcane obscenities at him as they floated towards him and reached out to claw out his eyes. He might have been saved if he had instead seen his friends and family reaching out to him, begging him to stand up and call an ambulance.

But he didn't. He curled up into a little ball and shivered violently, tears spilling freely down his cheeks as he was assaulted by grotesque vision after groteque vision. A cluster of windblown branches smacking together became a vengeful man in a yellow suit, leering at him through a window and smacking the branches together. He saw a biker walk into his roommate's room and, standing over his bed and breathing heavily, began to masturbate furiously over his sleeping form. Fucking psycho was going to murder his roommate... and then he'd be next...

Please stop, he begged in a quivering voice as he held his hands up to shield his eyes. His veins began to separate from his hands, and, dancing about in cobra-like motions, pecked his cheeks. Don't do this... please don't do this... please... please... please...

And those were his last words. His eyes rolled up behind his head, and his body went limp, skin flushing a bright red and giving away the cause of death.

Heads hung and faces buried in their hands, those closest to him slowly drifted through the portal to return home. He promised he'd meet them all some day, but now he'd never get the chance... they'd never even get to communicate with him where he was going.

He awoke in a pitch black cave... he could only tell so because his head smacked against the walls, and his feet shifted the silt beneath them. A few cries for help with no answer... then a horrible, familiar scultting, and he was up to his neck in spiders, all of which began to furiously sting him all over.

You see, Lucifer is not a maniacal, hand-wringing tempter of souls, as he's commonly made out to be in kitschy popular culture. Remember that Lucifer was not granted his power, he was punished with it for his arrogance. For bragging to his creator and brothers about how righteous and beautiful he was, he was given the one terrible intern job none of the other angels would accept. If you ever had a chance to speak with him directly, he'd smirk and quip about how his job sorting souls for eternity tortured him more than his domain tortured the damned before returning to work.

Satan can't open the door to hell. If he could, he would have run away a long time ago.

Only you can open the door to hell. And by the time you do, it's already too late to turn back.