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Edwin slammed the door behind him with little care and then stopped. He did not allow himself even a moment to feel the horror that came with ceasing movement. A new room meant new rules and he HAD to learn them.
With quick, darting eyes, Edwin took in everything he could. Plaster walls with dingy grey-green paint, concrete floor, cobweb covered boxes stacked under stairs, several metal filing cabinets with varying degrees of rust. No people. No monsters.
He span around and the door he’d emerged from was gone, leaving only bare, pockmarked wall. Mildew and what was likely black mold edged the ceiling. Troubling, but not the first time a door had disappeared. Edwin forced himself to give the room another look, he couldn’t miss ANYTHING.
The first time he’d been in the purgatory lobby, it’d been empty. Then he rang that fucking bell.
Edwin took a steadying breath and then made for the stairs. He allowed the ever present terror licking up his spine to drive his legs to running. He’d made good time up the last stairs, he hadn’t even heard the creature at his heels, but it would catch up soon. It always caught up.
Edwin hesitated only briefly at the top of the stairs, hand hovering over the knob. It couldn’t be so easy. Hell never made anything easy.
He forced his hand around the knob. No way to know but to try. He twisted the knob and it gave way easily. The door opened out at the end of a narrow corridor, white painted bricks and noisy overhead lights. Two doors with plaques beside them on the same wall as the one he’d come from. One door at the opposite end with a glowing “Exit” above it. He quickly threw himself into the corridor and shut the door behind him. Anything to slow the monster down.
The door did not disappear. He took note of the plaque beside it, it read “Basement Access” with a diagram of stairs and a little stick man walking down them. Edwin committed it to memory and, with a slowness that had his fingers twitching, started walking down the corridor.
The first door read “Storage 2”. Edwin wondered that it had stayed the exact distance down the corridor it had looked to be when he came out the Basement Access door. The plaque had strange bumps on it under the letters. Edwin touched them before he could stop his stupid limbs.
They felt like very little under his fingers. Curiously little. Edwin paused a moment that had nothing to do with escaping. Where he’d expected texture, there wasn’t anything. Or, there was, put it felt like nothing he’d ever experienced. Faint and lacking depth.
A noise like a buzz or bell filtered into the corridor from somewhere and Edwin wrenched his hand away. He froze, he always fucking froze.
No new horrors came for him.
But the old one was still on his heels.
Edwin moved further down the corridor. The second door’s plaque read “Storage 1”. Edwin did not touch it. Maybe on his next go through the corridor, he’d open those doors and see if there was anything useful.
He reached his first choice. Hell, he’d found, had a certain sense of humor and loved “Exit” signs. Usually whatever stood on the other side of them was a new level of horrific, but they did typically lead somewhere new. He swallowed. Whatever the purpose of the basement and the corridor, it wasn’t yet apparent. Edwin had no interest in waiting for it to become so. He’d learn eventually.
Until then, Edwin gripped the latest doorknob and twisted.
Noise. Noise and chaos and bodies. Edwin almost wanted to go back to the quiet solitude of the corridor. But one did not go deeper into Hell voluntarily. He shut the door behind him.
It wasn’t the first time he’d come upon a new room and it was filled with people. No, that dubious honor went to Avarice. He’d almost been happy for the monster to catch him after that. Edwin shook the thought away, pushed it down to join the others in the box he’d made for his emotions. He quickly conjugated several Latin verbs to clear his mind of that business.
Five ambulatory people filled the room, with three more seated at a round table. A door across the room was held open by a ninth person and even more bodies streamed by on its other side.
“Close the door already, James,” one of the women at the table said loudly and Edwin flinched.
“Alright, alright.” The James person handed a paper to a person Edwin could not see on the other side of the wall and then fully entered the room.
Everyone was talking, Edwin took in none of the actual words, just the tones. It all sounded like English, which was odd, but their words hardly mattered. There was another door.
It wouldn’t be as easy to get through this room. Not with all these people. They’d not taken notice of him yet, but they probably would the second he moved. Lust was like that. They only tried to pull him in after he edged away from the entryway.
He watched them for precious seconds. Not every bit of Hell was themed, but that peculiar, awful humor meant most of it was. What was the theme here? What had it been for the Basement and the White Corridor?
Edwin watched three of the five standing people prepare beverages or pull oddly colorful bags out of what looked to be maybe an icebox of some kind. Those three joined the others seated while the remaining three standing chatted by a jug of water.
The now six seated at the table ate. It was not with the fervor or indulgent vigor of Gluttony. None of them made sick after swallowing.
Edwin’s pulse, never slow, quickened and his anxiety twisted so strongly in his stomach he worried about needing to expel it somehow.
He’d wasted too much time watching. The monster would be on him soon. Stupidly, he made a break for the other door.
The anticipated hands did not grab him.
No alarms rang or hunting horns sounded.
Nothing at all happened except a startled yelp when he slammed the door behind him.
Edwin’s stomach twisted again. Too easy. Too easy. Three rooms with nothing was too much. He couldn’t… He couldn’t…
Edwin pressed his knuckles together so hard he’d have broken them in life. He shoved his panic down violently as several more verbs passed through his mind. He forced himself to look around. Another fucking corridor. This one with…
Windows.
Edwin froze. Always freezing.
Windows.
He’d never…
Hell didn’t have windows anywhere else.
Was that… sunlight?
Trees?
He found himself standing before a window without knowing he’d moved. A breeze ruffled leaves in a tree on the other side of the glass. A green stretched out between buildings.
Edwin reached for the glass, touched it before he could think better of it. Smooth.
And, curiously, nothing, like those bumps had been on the plaque. The slightest of pressure against his fingertips and the knowledge that glass was smooth.
Edwin couldn’t stop looking at the way the tree branches danced in the wind long enough to give the odd sensation another thought. There were trees here.
And sunlight.
And boys his age laying out on the grass in the shade of those trees.
They wore uniforms. Unlike any he’d seen before but too similar to one another to be anything but that. Grey pants cropped too short, showing their socks and shoes. Blue shirts with buttons only at the necks and oddly floppy collars, the sleeves much too short. Soft looking cream sweaters that some of them had balled up under their heads while others had left indecently unbuttoned.
Soft.
Edwin took a deep breath. A thought, a painful, dizzying thought, started gathering at the back of his mind.
He swallowed down the lump even that much brought to his throat.
In a sort of daze, Edwin kept watching. Too long, the anxiety screamed, but he couldn’t look away.
A boy, curly hair glinting in the sunlight, played with a ball. Played.
Edwin watched him kick it up and somehow bounce it only with his legs and chest so that it didn’t touch the ground for long stretches. He smiled the longer it took. He laughed.
Edwin was closer, somehow. Despite the wall and the windows. Part of his brain noted it, questioned it. The larger part couldn’t stop bringing him closer. Birds were chirping. The wind didn’t howl but rustle. Edwin’s footsteps on the grass didn’t crunch like bones snapping.
The boy, still playing, still smiling, kept the ball up the longest yet. Long legs working with an ease and grace Edwin never had, in life or death. He stopped a few paces from the boy. This close, Edwin could see beads of sweat on his brow, the odd shaved lines by his temple, the earring dangling from one lobe.
The boy lost control of the ball and it thumped gently to the grass. He laughed.
It was beautiful.
Edwin couldn’t breathe.
Beautiful things didn’t…
His throat closed up and he couldn’t stand anymore.
Beautiful things didn’t happen in Hell.
He collapsed there, on the grass beside a boy who gave no indication of seeing Edwin falling apart. For once, he couldn’t hold in the sounds of his crying.
The boy kicked the ball back into the air. A boy playing in the sun. Just a boy playing in the sun on a nice day.
Beautiful things didn’t happen in Hell.
The thought. The one that could truly break him, would not be held back any longer.
Edwin had escaped.
He could not contain himself any longer. Every single bit of fear and grief and torment he’d pushed down so that he could focus on the one goal he’d ever allowed himself broke free. It was awful.
It was freeing.
It overwhelmed him so much he hardly noticed when the boy, the boy who laughed beautifully, picked up the ball with his hands and started walking away. Except it was also all he could notice.
No sane thoughts controlled him. Only the knowledge that if he did not keep this boy in sight he was going to be dragged back to Hell.
Aware of nothing else but that, Edwin followed.
(.)
Charles. That was the boy’s name. Edwin learned it at some point in his mindless haunting of the poor soul. Without any idea when he’d actually managed to escape, Edwin couldn’t quite tell how long he did follow the boy around before coming back to himself enough to realize how inappropriate it was to be doing it. He did not know this child and it made very little sense to haunt him.
Edwin eventually pulled himself together enough to actually agree with himself and leave Charles alone. Well, to stop following his every step at least.
Instead, Edwin found himself utterly unable to leave St. Hilarion’s. Because, of course, that was where he eventually learned he was. Rather than haunt a stranger, Edwin decided to haunt the school. Or, rather, he told himself that was what he was doing and gave himself the small mercy of not questioning it further.
Edwin hid himself away in an attic and carefully did not think about anything for a long time.
Time… it meant nothing practical to him anymore. It was obvious that a lot had changed at the school while he’d been… away. But how long that was? What did that mean? Edwin couldn’t bring himself to care.
He noted it only as far as to realize he could not, in fact, care about it before moving on. The attic had several boxes and in one he found a wealth of notebooks. There were pens as well. Pens utterly unlike any he’d known in life, but it hardly took an idiot to figure out how to use them.
He’d never had anything like a way to keep track of information in Hell. He’d been forced to memorize every little thing and be punished brutally for every fault of memory.
He wrote everything he could confidently remember. Added in diagrams and details until his fingers were somehow sore despite the curious nothingness of his existence on Earth.
Then he did it all again in another notebook, ignoring the first and then the second and third until he had several around him. He compared them, striking out inconsistencies. Then, finally, in a fifth notebook, he copied over everything in his clearest penmanship. When he was done, he was glad to have practiced if only because his clearest penmanship was still quite poor. He’d last written when he lived.
For a period after that, all Edwin could bring himself to do was clutch all five copies to himself in a vain effort to fuse the paper with his body.
All he succeeded in doing was passing the lot through his newly incorporeal self a heart wrenching number of times before figuring out how to keep his chest and arms and everything else solid enough to hold on.
Eventually, Edwin watched sunlight track across the attic enough times to realize he was counting. He was startled to find he was already past twenty. The sun had followed the same track across the room twenty four times at least since he’d finished his notebooks.
Twenty four days. Edwin remembered caring about days once. Early on in his time in Hell he’d tried counting them. But Sa’al’s dominion had the same amount of sunlight as the rest of Hell and it quickly became pointless. Without the sun, the shackles of sleep, or the whispers of hunger, what would even mark a day?
He had sun now. He tracked its progress across the attic room twelve more times before he thought to do anything besides watch.
Edwin stood. He clutched his notebooks close and walked to the window that let the light in. Looked out.
Trees.
A small forest, more a large thicket, ran up to the building Edwin took refuge in and hurried off into an ever thinning line that ultimately stretched towards what he finally realized was a cricket field. Several boys, small as the joint of his littlest finger, played.
Edwin looked away.
He looked back. Watched them play a game he’d maybe once known the rules for but had long since forgotten.
Last time he’d watched through a window… Edwin’s brain caught.
Last time he’d watched through a window, he’d been able to go outside without touching a door. Could he…?
Edwin pressed his fingers to the middle window pane. The same curious nothing feeling he’d had since arriving back on Earth met him. It was nothing like touching things in Hell, where every sensation carried at least a little of pain or horror or both.
This was… well, Edwin pressed his whole hand to the pane. There was nothing like glass as he remembered it. No temperature registered, neither cool or warm. He slid his palm carefully across the mullions. The texture did not meaningfully change, though Edwin knew it should. He closed his eyes for a moment, curiosity well piqued, and ran his hand down the whole window.
It felt the same. All of it, glass and wood. All that registered really was pressure, the absolutely slightest amount. Enough to know he was still in contact with something, but insufficient to understand what exactly. Edwin opened his eyes to confirm and, yes. His hand rested against the wall beside the window.
I am dead, Edwin thought and it was not the first or even hundredth time. It was, however, the first time he had considered what that could mean for him amongst the living.
In his own life, he’d not thought much of ghosts. The specter of death hung over him certainly, raging on the continent as it was, but he’d not given any consideration to what actually happened to a soul once it vacated the body. The church provided those answers and Edwin hadn’t been inclined to question it then.
Now, standing as a soul long dead but not long gone, Edwin considered.
He needed information. And he wouldn’t be finding it in this attic.