Dear Diary--A Journal From Purgatory, Patrick Sean Lee [thriller novels to read TXT] 📗

the building…from page 653,081 of the book: Repent of your sins and prepare thyself to enter into the cleansing fire.

What madman would wish this torture on his...her...children? If ‘repenting of my sins’ is what is required, though, so be it. I will kneel before that terrible guard and confess offenses I haven’t committed; do anything necessary to gain admittance.


Tomorrow I go back to the entrance to the lower world.

Goodnight


March 25

Dear Diary,

Ann cried once again when I left her, but I swore I’d return with her mother; that she was not to lose hope.

“Go to your home, your friends, and the Guardian,” I said as I kissed her forehead. “They will take care of you until we return. It won’t be long.” I left her there and entered, alone…I thought.


So now what am I to do? Ann is here beside me. After I’d discovered her tailing me I ushered her back toward the door and began pounding on it, screaming for the Gatekeeper to open it.

“Won’t work,” she told me. “He won’t open the door to knocks from in here. We tried it.”

Ann told me how simple it had been to slip past the Gatekeeper; that she’d done it once in the past with her friends. Like most everyone else, is he blind to their presence? This cauldron of suffering frightened them, she said, and so they retreated and snuck back out the door when it opened to admit another penitent.

We sit at this late hour on an outcropping of rock that overlooks a valley of steam and moaning as I write in your pages. Though I can see the flames rising and falling beneath the layer of steam, the cavern is dark and ominous, but not silent. Ann. I can see her eyes scanning left, right, left again, down into the pit. With each momentary wisp of a clearing in the swirl of steam and smoke she leans forward, looking. Always looking.

She holds fast to my arm with her hands. We will rest a bit, now. Tomorrow we will go forward and down to find Teresa and then bring her out.


March 26

Dear Diary,

We trudged along the valley rim on a narrow path gouged out of the side of the black mountain for hours. Or what seemed like hours; it might have been only moments. We stopped, moved again, stopped, at Ann’s whim. She’s a strange little girl. This moment frightened, the next ebullient and inquisitive concerning the harsh landscape.

“Where do you think she is?” Ann asked as we rounded a turn in the pathway.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but we’ll find her, I promise you.”

Much later, in the distance ahead of us I could hear water. Not a gurgling stream, but more like rushing rapids. It grew louder as we continued onward, and when we turned once again, following the contour of the mountain, we saw it. A gigantic waterfall that began high above us and roared downward into a massive lake. The path ended at the falls and several souls stood at the its edge in the roadway, stepping into the spray momentarily, and then back out, wringing their fingers through their hair as though they were taking a shower. We had no choice but to approach them; four men and four women. Ann lingered behind, clutching the sides of my waist with her tiny fingers.

“Greetings,” I recall having said to them lamely. Each of them looked at me warily. None smiled. None returned my salutation at first, either. At last a man about my age stepped forward from among them, and after glancing at Ann, spoke.

“A child? What could possibly have been her sin?”

I told him there had been none; that we were simply there looking for a woman named Teresa.

“There must be at least a million here by that name…well, I should think. But how does a child enter? I don’t get it.”

Ann seemed to lose her momentary bout of fear and replied, “I snucked in.”

“You shouldn’t be here. You must get out before…” He halted, looked behind him at the rush of water, down to the churning lake, and then back at Ann. “You see that water? You’ll fall in, and then where will you be? Drowned like a rat in a sewer, that’s where.”

“You didn’t fall,” she said. I chuckled inwardly. She was right.

“Hah! Not yet, but no doubt I will.”

“Why don’t you just step back so that you don’t?”

From the mouths of babes…

“TO WHERE? Look down there. That’s where we’re all headed! To drown over and over in the lake of grace until we can fill our lungs no longer and are moved…I guess into the cataracts of the river far away, there to wind up God knows where.”

I glanced over the edge into the lake. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the arms and heads of miserable-looking people bobbed up amidst the splashing of the water, and then disappeared quickly, like tiny sticks caught in a horrible vortex. Two of the four among us—a man and a woman—moaned loudly, and then leapt off the cliff. It seemed to take them an eternity to hit the surface of the lake water. They disappeared in the undertow. The man beside us then brushed the soaked hair from off his face and turned to the woman standing shivering a few feet away from him. He left us and went to her. He said something in a low voice to her, at which she bit her lip and shook her head ‘yes’. They stepped to the ragged edge, hesitated, and then jumped. The woman’s screams could be heard until they died in the roar of the water.

“Do you think Mother…”

I told her no, that there must be another way out of that place we’d found ourselves in. I walked to the sheet of water that undulated in and out, in and out at its whim, a pulsating spray exploding onto the path and myself like a million infinitely small fingers. I noticed as I stared—Ann clutching my inward arm—that the road we stood on continued…perilously, yes…behind the Niagra-like fall of water.

“She went this way,” I yelled over the noise. “Take hold of my hand. Don’t be frightened.”

I was.

But then neither of us was capable of dying again, only drowning a hundred or a thousand times, separated and alone most likely after we landed. And so we edged along the slippery shelf, facing outward, our backs to the rock, our fingers clutching the depressions of the wall. Not long afterward we found a corner of sorts that opened into an even darker space, a cavern. Wet, but roomy enough so that I, at least, took a deep breath and uttered a thank you…to no one in particular. The interior was very dim, but in the distance a tiny glimmer of light was visible high up near the stalactite-covered ceiling.

I had no idea, Diary, whether Teresa might have gone the way we chose. Reason told me she would simply have jumped from the ledge in her depressed state like all the rest. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the decision we made was guided by something higher…and I ascribe that to a kindly nod by some power that hears the laments of innocent children. Someone or some thing

that is at his or her heart good, and not the author of this place. Teresa came this way, I was certain of it.

We walked for hours (days, months?) through the room. The heat rose and the dampness faded the closer we came to the light. Twilight. Dismal. We eventually approached a deep, fifty-meter diameter hole in the floor. Beside it at the head of a precipitous-looking rock stairway stood another figure that reminded me of the cowled creature guarding the entrance so far back. I took hold of Ann’s hand and walked up to him, intent on asking him if he’d seen a woman fitting Teresa’s description. But, how was I to describe her? Such and such a height, dark hair, naked? A moot musing. He nodded as if he’d read my mind, and then pointed toward the other side of the pit, saying but one word. “There.”

There. So, as I suspected, she had not jumped into the lake, nor had she yet begun the descent into who-knows-what?

Ann left my side at a dead run, yelling at the top of her voice, “Mother! Mother! Mother!” Over and over. A great wailing arose from the catacombs in the distance from many women cowering inside them. I left the creature and ran after Ann. She reached one of the openings and dashed inside. I heard a mixed burst of joyous laughter and crying. “Go away, please…I can’t…what I did…” And so on.

Again I hesitated, Diary. Should I interrupt? Throw myself at Teresa’s knees and thank the stars I…we…found her? I understood her feelings of guilt, truly, and yet the object of her despair was not me. And honestly, what could I have said to her? “Come, come, now. Everything is fine again?”

Everything was not fine. Still, life number one back on Earth in our physical-ness is history and completely finished, yet only the first of many chapters of the books we are, the vast majority of pages yet to be written. I knew that Teresa had only led Ann out of the initial chapter unknowingly, and perhaps saving her a long life of pain in some way neither Teresa nor I could understand. Even here in eternity we are unable to “see” the purpose of our existences I think. Now at last they were re-united, and that was most likely fated from the very beginning.

I let them be, anxious to enter the cave, yet knowing it was not yet time. If Teresa was to re-emerge, her Ann would be the person to accomplish the rescue this time.

I await them, very tired, signing off for now.

Goodnight.


March 27

Dear Diary,

It was hot today, those hours we spent outside the pit of quasi-despair anyway; that place consigned to the remission of “temporal guilt”. Consigned by whom, I wonder? Where is God—the him or her or it—in this vicious universe? I can understand Hell where we are drawn according to our deepest desires and depravities; because of what we really are. Where we are free to leave if we so desire, although the vast majority of us do not.

We all move on, whether by promptings from God or Lucifer or ourselves. We move if where we are becomes unbearable.

Who created Hell? Lucifer? I think so. And yet it is only another country, inhabited and given its perverse vitality by the creatures who make up its citizenry. But who created that place worse than Hell; that Purgatorio where we are led to believe that our failings are something we need to make painful and long, long amends for? I have sinned, and so I must drown or burn a thousand, a million times in order that I might…

what? Become presentable to a wicked and petty God who demands something impossible of us?

I think God and Lucifer are one and the same, and he is not omnipotent. And yet we found little Ann in Purgatory. How did she arrive there? I think back to the nun… ‘As for why they wait here, it is because He has said this is where they should be.’ Babes—children, in fact—do not choose