Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 49 - Hell

This is Episode 49 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store or at  Amazon.

Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

Hell

“Dante, tell me more about the dark one who almost captured me. Also, may I ask, what was the fate of my seducer, the one without faith, the one who conducted this experimental journey to the perfect?”

“Let us fly higher upward into the blue sky,” Dante said. “I will show you. But these visions could easily crush your fragile soul. Only glance at it briefly. Look back often at the Elysian Fields to remind you. Now, see your friend in the dark place, there.”

Curcio was speeding away from the earth into the blackest night. To where? We saw a light, one-millionth of a circle wide. He had only this object to go toward. Tens of thousands of others were falling too, with him, like raindrops.

Tranquility flushed Curcio’s face. For him, it was death as he had planned. It was simplicity, warmth, and peace. To his side, the stars that I had seen lit up. They were bright like the clearest night, but fainter than the light in front. They seemed to peer back. One was a pair. Eyes. They all became pairs, then they became brighter. These pointed eyes soon constituted faces. Curcio’s sights again turned to the onrushing light. The most brilliant light was white warm, white peaceful. That was his imagined version of death; it was not the gross faces at the side. He rushed to death, to warmth, and to bathing comfort.

The end light grew more rapidly now. It transformed from a point to a line. It grew a face and hands. The light was a human form, at the opening of a vertical tunnel. It was the being of light that I had seen, before the angels lifted me away. For Curcio, this warmth could reassure billions of people.

“Hello, Anthony.” Words on paper could not describe the comfort, warmth, and compassion that this being emitted. He and Curcio now stood among pointy red flowers and pine trees.

On the other side of that forest, a black fence loomed. Across it dwelled the dead. Over the wall was the permanent peace Curcio had chosen.

“Your life has been a prosperous one, Anthony,” the light-being said. “You have filled yourself with knowledge, but you often have pained others.”

“I only meant to give them knowledge into themselves.”

“Yes, Anthony, I see your intent. I understand. It is time for you to see the events of your life.”

Immediately, over the next thirty-five years or thirty-five seconds, one cannot determine which, his life occurred within that fragrant air. His events, conversations, and reflections presented themselves all at once. Curcio grasped only pain. The being presented the sentiments of those affected, the millions. The anguish caused within the hearts of the millions annoyed Curcio. He often turned his head from the images in reflex, but they followed and surrounded him. When he looked at the being, he found his only solace.

“Great being, must I suffer this any longer? May I go with you now?”

“Yes, Anthony. You have seen your entire life. But these images will linger within you for eternity. You may go back to your earthly life now. Or you may stay here, and I will comfort you. I will forgive you. We know that everything you did was not due to your own volition. We permit everything.”

“You truly provide the comfort that I need and that I never received on earth,” Curcio said. “I see that now. Earthly life was severely painful.”

“You will stay with me then?”

“I do not choose now. I choose as I would in life.” As the words transmitted, the stars above and ahead erupted into flames. The light being smiled at him and mushroomed into a flame. Curcio’s eyes singed. The being leaped away from him, onto the wall in the distance.

“This way, Anthony.”

Curcio ran toward the light-being over the meadows on his newly grown legs. The flowers and pine trees became weeds and sticks. The meadow fell to darkness.

“I am following you, being of the light. Help me.”

Darkness now was almost total. Stars rose in the air around him. The light-being had become a speck of light again. Another tunnel formed around Curcio. The blackness thickened as the tunnel closed in. The weedy land became steeper, downward, and blacker. The wall seemed farther away.

“Come, Jonathan,” Dante said. “Up here.” We rose above Curcio on the black path. “But look back at the Elysian Fields often, Jonathan. Take only brief glimpses into the wasteland below, because without God’s mercy, that is the place to which your soul would have gone.”

Heat now licked the air above the grassy, peaceful Elysian Fields of grass and flowers.

Our view was high above a depression in a black and red land. Rings were carved into the sides of a pit confined by the wall. Billions of bodily forms crawled along in the filth. Gray and red taskmasters battered them. The light-being stood on a cliff overlooking the mayhem.

“The devil,” I said, “no longer wears horns and a pointed tail.”

“True,” Dante said. “That was folklore. On earth, he uses deception, not grotesquerie, to entrap his recruits. Where God is absent, on the battlefield earth, the darkness, in the form of Satan, fills in. But in hell, he rules all, in any form he wants. Here reside his followers: those who rejected God’s prompts, who quelled all longings for the life full of holy love, and those who enabled Satan’s inspiring others to reject Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Father. They exist here with their beloved bodies, without the light of God. They are united in a body only by the lack of God’s light and by the sheer weight of their bones.”

“It is ghastly. The poor souls.”

“Not at all, Jonathan. They know they are expected to be here. These were the souls who were called to love, but they repeatedly made eternal, unalterable choices to shun God. They did not desire to be with the Holy Trinity, and their natures cannot change, now or ever. They rarely longed for a higher love. They scoffed at it or plotted against it. They rarely wished to overcome the failings of their soul as it resided in the material. They rarely wished to forget the self, and never will. They did not desire to love. Now they scorn and blame God for their ceaseless toils. Once again, I advise you to look back to the green fields.”

We drifted closer to the black ditches, then we flew back over the wall that circled the pit, nearer to Curcio, who still lumbered down the shadowed black path toward that distant wall. Sometimes he ran on his heavy legs. He breathed deeply and heaved. The hill pushed him down to the light. He attempted to stop, reaching out to the dark walls that seemed to enclose him, but he fell. He yelled and tumbled downward. The air thickened as the light grew redder around him.

He stopped rolling on the rim of the colossal pit of people. He could see the being that beguiled him presiding over it. The base of the wall was still farther down a steeper slope. He could stare down at the masses. Herds of billions of people clamored about. He gagged at the sight of the stark-naked zombies milling around in ditches in the wasteland. They screamed in torment. They spread over rocky terrain, rivers, caverns, and chasms. A lake of fire burned as if oil spilled on it. Ditches and slabs of rock covered the bumpy land as far as he could see in the sooty air.

The weight of the air and his body pressured Curcio further down the cliff-like ravine. He passed people who stared ahead. Sometimes they looked at him as if their eyes had no purpose but to boil in their skulls. They stumbled by, as if their feet had no purpose but to keep the weight of their bodies from plunging into the ash and filth below. He faltered but managed to keep his now nude body erect.

“Sorenson!” he yelled. A friend. Through the heavy black air, Curcio saw the naked man heaping rocks on a cart on the almost-vertical path.

“Hello, Sorenson. What is this place?”

Sorenson looked up at him with a frown. Only one glance at his old friend was allowed, it seemed, as if the tonnage of the air did not permit his neck to twist from his inane task. Curcio lurched onward down the black path. The hair on his back flamed and singed and grew back. His eyes pulsed in his head, as if someone placed white coals into his face. The heat and weight of the air stifled his breathing. He panted. His tongue outside his mouth shriveled and cracked. His eyeballs then burst. He saw their liquid splatter over the black ground. Two more eyes grew in his head, reborn with scalding ferocity.

He hobbled against the opening of a stone building, which at any moment would crumble, it seemed. Bare people stomped about inside, shoulder to shoulder, flowing with the mass. No one could move freely. Only the sound of heaving and anguish emerged from the building. He was not required to be there. He was pushed down into the smog.

The heavy air shoved him into the reeking black ash at the gates of the wall. It was a dozen stories tall. The gates were red with heat and sealed tightly. No light penetrated the space between its doors. Words were etched into the iron. Curcio read them through clenched teeth: “Abandon all hope, for here the anguish never ceases.”

A suction. The seal eased. The colossal gates creaked. Moans and howls intensified as the door swung open. Curcio shouted his hatred for the One whom he thought wanted to condemn him here. For many minutes, he yelled his disgust. “Where is Jonathan?” he cried. “Why isn’t he here? He should be at my side!”

He yelled vows: If he ever met his Judge, he would hurl whatever filth he could muster at Him. How could He dare condemn a man such as he? How dare He inhibit greatness?

Grotesque brown demons slithered through the gates, punched and grappled him with greasy hands and feet, and dragged his charred body into the murkiness. The gates slammed and sucked shut.

On the other side of the wall, pus-ridden beasts leaped on him, ripped off his arms and legs, and lapped up the blood. The appendages promptly grew back. A larger gray demon flew up and scolded the Harpies. They darted off into the woods miles away. The gray demon hurled Curcio into the air. Curcio fell like a boulder and dented the black filth. Then a ferryman ran up to him, lifted him, and flipped him into a river of blood. Heaving and choking with blood and pus, Curcio grabbed the creature’s boat as it drifted. The boat dragged him along. It was guided by the ferryman, who resounded a guttural laugh as he pulled the rope. Curcio sank behind the boat, still choking on blood.

“We must help him, Dante.”

“His condition is truly lamentable, but we cannot assist him.”

The next time Curcio bobbed up for a breath, the gray demon plucked him up by the hair and spiked him on the riverside.

“Must he die to the earth, Dante? After this scare, his nefarious mission on earth would surely cease. Or, perhaps if he is only debilitated there, instead of killed.”

“I doubt it would reform him, Jonathan. And the light-being determines his predicament here, not the Almighty.”

“But his punishment is horrifying! Why does God allow this to happen?”

“Truly, the sufficient wrath of God is the absence of God. He does not save everyone, and we will not fully understand why. We souls also do not understand the atrociousness of Lucifer’s tortures. But the rejected angel enjoys these tortures. He is jealous of men, especially those who gave up the opportunity to dwell with the God he once loved. To be without the golden light over the trees edging the meadows, which I beg you to review now, alone would be enough to agonize us eternally.”

The horned, gray demon shouted at the ferryman on the other side of the red river. The demon brandished a crop with a scorpion on the tip. He butted the old ferryman with his two horns. The old man ran off, clutching his gouged eye sockets. The demon then rammed Curcio, who lay flat on the red dirt. The demon rose, increasing in size. The body of Curcio impaled on his two barbed horns. The demon stomped on, to a bridge that spanned more ditches. The damned moved about within them. The gluttonous were buried in filth and eaten by a three-headed dog. The carnal were blown back and forth in mid-air by gusts of wind. At a swamp’s edge in one of these ditches, a flame burst forth from a tower.

Another boatman drove up in a wedge-shaped motorboat, spewing the muddy filth of the swamp onto the demon. The boatman jumped up and over the bridge, ripping Curcio off the gray demon’s horns. Curcio shrieked. The gray demon roared. The boatman plunged Curcio deep into the slime and sped away. The raging gray demon caught the speedboat and smashed it against the side of the ditch. The demon grew to an enormous height, then plunged his head into the filth. After eight times spearing singing yet morose men and women, he lanced Curcio. The gray hellion lurched onward through the mud river. He trudged over more bridges, over huge ditches of the unforgiven, past a snake-haired woman.

He stopped over a graveyard. Thousands of bright red coffins lay scattered. Some were buried. Some were half-buried. I could see that beings lay within the caskets. Incessant howls filled the air. The iron caskets were red from the flames that scorched them. The gray demon flung Curcio high into the murky air, near Dante and me. He thudded into a white-hot casket. He condemned God as his body seared to the coffin.

“They punish him as a heretic,” Dante said. “It has been said, ‘These are the arch-heretics of all cults; Far more than you would think lie stuffed into these vaults.’ He will lie burning and screeching there for all time. On the final Day of Reconciliation, it is said that their coffin lids will be sealed.”

“I truly did pity that earthly genius,” I said. “But after hearing his words of shame against that holy light of Love, I retract that. Why does he not repent?”

“Repentance is a choosing, which the dead cannot do. On earth, it is a glorious revelation of one’s divergence from God. It is a gift from Christ, offered constantly. In living, when we declare to another human, one of Christ’s disciples, our particular and number of acts and thoughts leading away from God, we declare our renunciation of these faults and our desire to defeat evil. These damned had no desire for that. They now despise God.”

The image of hell cleared away. We flew down to the soft grasses of the meadows.

Next week: Episode 50 - Graces

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