The Day Pass

The Day Pass

Where the fuck am I and what the fuck is that smell? I feel strange.

“Good afternoon” I whip around and there’s a guy standing there, wearing a suit of some sort, I don’t recognize the fabric.

“Where am I?”

“Hell.” What the fuck, did…

“Did I die?”

“Oh. No. This is your day pass.”

“A day pass. For Hell?” Did he just say what I think he said??

“You’re on the cusp, if you continue the way you’re currently living your life you’ll end up in purgatory, which we closed…. A century or two ago? Which means you’ll end up in Hell. Today we’re giving you a tour of your future so that you can decide what you want to do next.”

This is a joke, a TV show prank, some bullshit. I ate something off, seafood? Shellfish? What did I eat last? Why is he smiling?

“I can hear your thoughts, no prank, no seafood, this is Hell.”

Well fuck. Fuck he can hear me. Fuck does saying fuck make me go to Hell more?

“No it doesn’t. What matters is what you do. Well saying things CAN count as doing but in this instance it doesn’t matter. Oh and I can hear your subconscious, my suit is made out of human skin. Tanned.”

Disgusting. “Is that a Demon thing?”

It laughed. “There are Demons of course, but I’m a fallen angel, my wings were cut but I’m still an angel, I can’t lie, I’m designed to serve the almighty, yadda yadda yadda. But you’ll see on our tour, we have… limited resources here.”

As far as limited resources go everything looks normal. Normal hallways, normal floors, normal clocks, normal… No wait. Everything seems slightly off. I touched the wall and my hand recoiled immediately, the wall was warm and felt… alive.

“It is alive. Back in the torture days a bunch of demons thought it would be fun to make a new type of building and they basically… stretched condemned souls into this final shape. Ironically a person on a day pass saw what we did and loved it and adopted it to your modern cubicle farm office buildings.”

Sure enough another door led to a massive room full of cubicles and people basically working. Didn’t seem too demonic or tortury to me. I could hear the fallen angel stifle a laugh. Yeah I guess this is torture, but we do it to ourselves. The fallen angel finger gunned me with a grin. Great. He’s a bro.

I stopped at a desk and looked at what was going on. Paperwork. Stamps. No computer. An inbox and outbox. Seems pretty standard albeit archaic. I looked closer at one of the forms and it was written in a language that while I couldn’t readily understand it seemed oddly familiar. Almost like-

I was tugged away, “Whoa there fella, no reading Angelic for you. It’ll muck your mortal brain up.”

At the word mortal the person sitting in the cubicle shot a look at me. It was a middle aged looking lady but her iris was black and her sclera was yellow. Looked awful. She sniffed me and leaned back making a face. “Ugh. Too fresh. Come back when you’re ready Day Pass…” She returned to her work leaving me with a what the hell look on my face.

The fallen Angel pinched my elbow and dragged me along.

“When we collapsed purgatory into Hell we inherited a bunch of people who weren’t quite bad enough or good enough to go anywhere. This is the new Purgatory. When we inherited those souls we stopped torture altogether and now we have… Well now we have self-torture. You’ll see as we progress but the only pain you’ll see is the pain people inflict upon themselves. As they forgive themselves they get job upgrades, perks, and eventually, St Peters gates.”

“So where are we now?”

“Kinda like the middle. We’re on our way down so you get a sense of what self-torture really means.”

Great.

We reached a bank of elevators, most of the buttons were grimy with what looked to be dried blood. The Angel pressed the down button which seemed to be the dirtiest and smiled at me.

“Yes it’s blood.” He casually commented.

“Oh.”

“Yes. You’ll see.”

The Elevator opened and we entered, he hit SB60, “Sub basement 60. There are 60 levels below the basement that more or less reflect our original Hell. 60 is equivalent to Tartarus, you might know it as Hades? The under-hell. It’s going to be. You’ll see.”

The Elevator ride was so slow. Each floor opened up and a person entered dragging a corpse behind them. Within minutes the Elevator was at capacity, yet more and more jammed in. It wasn’t until a person with a shock of red hair entered who was also carrying a corpse with the same hair that it dawned on me. Everyone is carrying their own corpse? How?

The Angel caught my eye, “In the old days if you died in Hell you’d be sent down to Tartarus. Now with everything collapsed into one, if your body dies in Hell you’re immediately kind of, reborn into a new body almost instantaneously. And your first task is to take your corpse down to Level 60 for processing.”

Processing?

The Elevator chimed and the doors slowly slid open, the stench was unbearable. We waited until the Elevator cleared of corpse carrying souls before we exited ourselves. All around me was blood stains, smears, decay, flies, and stench. In the distance was a man trying to mop the floors but the water was so dirty and bloody he wasn’t making any progress.

“Best not to talk to that one. He was a child abuser in his former life. He’ll be here for a long time. Janitor on sub level 60 is generally the worst job there is. The water is never clean, so you’re just spreading the filth around. It’s awful. Let’s look at the next rung up shall we?”

Some of the souls from our elevator were passing us on their way back and I could see some sort of conveyor up ahead. The souls were piercing massive iron hooks through their former corpses and then hanging them on an overhead conveyor.

We skirted past and watched as the corpses went through its stations. First a person with a devilish looking knife expertly skinned the corpse.

“This is where we get the bulk of our clothing from. People on SB59 will process them and tan them into leather. Took a while to get it right. Humans used to be just naked, and demons and angels can manifest clothing at will. But with the big collapse we decided to clothe our humans.”

Next step someone took a thin knife to the joints and removed the legs, another person the arms, and so on… They then deboned the parts and sent the bones on one conveyor belt and the meat on another.

“The bones get turned into all sorts of things, principally building materials for our desks and chairs and even the elevator.”

Next step the meat was broken down further into standard cuts, and then wrapped in butchers paper.

“Wait.”

“Yep. See technically souls don’t need to eat in Hell. We’d just let them starve. But when the collapse happened something strange happened. Souls started to starve to death and we started building up this pile of bodies. So… problem solved.”

I threw up onto a worker who was busy cubing fingers. He looked up at me and muttered, “I deserved that.” Before I could even have a chance to apologize.

“Oh yeah. These guys have very little sense of self-worth. While we don’t torture anymore we can have them loop their crimes in their heads. Right now that guy has 2 things on his mind, his job here, and his crimes on earth. Looks like he was…. Oh. He was a teacher who’d lock his students in a steel box outside in the hot sun for hours a day. Most of the kids either died or went mad.”

I recoiled a bit and suddenly didn’t feel so bad about throwing up on him. Still.

I looked down the line, further down people were taking the carcasses off the hooks and breaking them down further.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

“What floor am I destined for?” I asked hesitantly.

“Right now? Level 15. 60 up and 60 down. You’d have to climb 45 levels to get out.”

“What’s at 15?”

“Let’s go upstairs first.”

It was then that I noticed…it. It was looming behind the working souls, it was all black with black unblinking eyes. It had an inky quality to it, a darkness, a quality to it that made it seemed like it was drawn in by a lazy artist after the fact.

“Ah. That’s a demon! Let’s say hi!”

The Angel grabbed me with a firm grip and dragged me over. The moment I made eye contact with the demon I relived my worse moments. I felt waves of shame and regret pour over me. The demon casually put it’s hand (hand?) on my head and I felt the shame lift. It then put its hand to its mouth and made a chewing noise.

“They feed on shame and guilt. Looks like you’ve been upgraded to Level 16 though! You’ve just forgiven yourself for what you did in 3rd grade.”

“I was just an idiot kid…”

“Yep. But shame and guilt are the anchors that keep everyone here down. You don’t have to forgive yourself, some things are unforgiveable. But you do have to accept it and feel remorse.”

“So if I spend the rest of my life…”

“You got it.”

The tanning floor reeked. I remember watching a special on tanning hides in India and the guy in the video saying how much it smelled but this?

“We collect urine from all souls and funnel it here. We also capture the acid from the stomachs of the dead and bring it here. And we mix in a few more chemicals and what not to get the right mix to tan human skin into hides. Pretty neat eh?”

I gagged a few times as I watched entire skins, hair and all, get dunked into a tank of acid. The hair sloughed off quickly and the skins blemishes burned bright red. One of the souls expertly cut out blemishes, genitalia, and nipples which all dropped into bins below. Likely to be reused elsewhere. The souls handled everything with their bare hands, so they were red and raw and looked painful.

I didn’t want to hear about their sad stories, since based on the looks in their eyes they were reliving nightmares.

I was about to peer into a tub when I was pulled away and back to the elevators.

“Let’s go to level 16.”

The elevator doors opened up to a food court. Looked pretty… standard I guess. Various restaurants and cuisines, lots of people milling around, a few smiles and laughs. Pretty normal looking. Except that it’s all human meat.

“This isn’t so bad.” I guess.

“No it’s not. You’d be managing one of these restaurants as a L16. Yeah it’s human meat, but it’s real French fries, and the milkshakes are real milk.”

“Real milk? From where?”

The angel grinned at me. Oh.

“And the potatoes?” I asked hesitantly.

“Actually they’re native to Hell. Not sure how they got onto Earth…. Strange. They’re so bland they were meant to be demon food. You know. For when they’re not consuming souls, or fears, or regrets, or limbs…”

My memory flashed back to that demon I met and I shuddered.

“Let’s go up to Level 60, your time is almost up!”

We entered the elevator and he hit 60. It shot up quickly and opened to a beautiful open meadow. Butterflies flitted around, birds chirped sweet songs.

“This is… wonderful!”

“Yeah it’s basically earth before the humans wrecked it. Clean water in the streams, fresh fruit everywhere, happy fluffy puppies roam in packs and tickle tackle people. The next level up are the gates, you can see them right up there. You just need to let go of your mortal body and ascend. It usually takes most people 10 to 15 years. Seeing the gates helps I think.”

On cue I hear excited yips in the distance as a pack of puppies tackled a person over and nuzzled and licked him. I could hear his laughter. Next to him were 3 people, one of whom suddenly sighed and dissolved into light and flew up to the gates.

The fallen angel smiled, “Lucky human. I’m not allowed back in. This is as close as I can get. You can’t hear them, but the Cherubs singing their praise to god fills the air here. It hurts knowing I can’t get closer.”

I don’t know what came over me but I hugged the fallen angel, I felt so bad for the guy, he made one mistake and he’s sentenced to deal with this mess?

He shoved me away hard and then collapsed to the ground, he grunted in pain and rolled around a few times before getting on all fours. He suddenly sprouted two glorious wings that shined like white gold. He stood up, tears in his eyes, he hugged me back.

“Keep doing this and you’ll skip the line and go right to the gates! And this act just bumped you up to L32! It’s time for you to go, and time for me to go home.”

He poked me in the middle of my forehead and I bolted out of my bed. I looked around the room trying to get my sense of presence back. Beer bottles, old pizza, that pile of smells I haven’t thrown out yet. Dirty clothes. I live in a pigsty. I stood up to start cleaning things up when I spotted a single white golden feather sitting on my countertop. I picked it up and felt that Angels presence. I placed it into a box and then tucked it away into my shelving unit, and then focused on cleaning this pig sty up.