“Hell is a box,” it said to the man. “Yes, it is. Hell is a box not much bigger than your own body. It is dark inside the box, and cold, but the encasement is thin—so thin that you can almost convince yourself that you can break out if you only tried. You cannot feel anything inside this box. But you can hear and… sense, to a certain extent. Outside of that box is everyone you ever loved. All the people you have cared for and who care for you. And they are in agony. You cannot touch them. They are screaming, calling for you—your name is always upon their lips. And you cannot go to them or comfort them in any way. And that is your hell, friend. Hell is a box.”
The knife’s handle danced along its knuckles, a neat trick. The shadows thickened and the lamp’s light bled low.
“What I have for you is not hell,” the Long Walker told the man. “But for a brief while, it may feel something like it.”
2
THEY DROVE EAST in the lightening day. Micah had rented a Cadillac Coupe DeVille. White leather seats, mahogany dash, A/C, crimson trim, quadraphonic stereo system with an eight-track player. Its big-bore V-8 purred. It wasn’t the sort of vehicle he would normally drive, but it suited his doomsday demeanor. No use saving for a rainy day when your days were numbered.
“You never moved far away, did you?” Minerva said from the backseat.
Micah said, “It is where we settled. Ellen wanted it.”
“That close? Practically living in the shadow of it?”
Micah said, “Somebody had to.”
They followed the road, letting it pull them back to the source. It felt almost like driving back through time: the last fifteen years washing away, putting them right where they had been… except they were older and more worn out and much more frightened than they had been all those years ago. They drove in silence for the most part, not listening to the radio even though the car speakers were top-of-the-line. The odometer clicked off the miles to Grinder’s Switch. They arrived early in the afternoon.
They pulled into the same gas station where they had stocked up on provisions fifteen years ago.
“I’ll wait here,” Eb said, stretching his bum leg out in the backseat.
“Get you anything?” Micah asked.
“A few bottles of Yoo-hoo, for consistency’s sake.”
Micah stepped into the store with Minerva. It looked remarkably as it had, apart from the addition of two video game cabinets beside the newspaper racks: Asteroids and Pac-Man. Micah watched the little yellow character like a pie with a wedge cut out of it racing round its maze, wakka-wakka-wakka-wakka. What was the point? Ah God, he was old. A fogey. Petty had asked for an Atari system not long ago. Micah said he didn’t want to see her wasting her time. But it was the duty of the young to waste their time, seeing as they had so much of it.
The man behind the counter was the same from years ago. He looked roughly a thousand years old. He wore dentures that pushed his lips apart, and his nose had been broken since Micah last set eyes on him. Micah bought Eb’s Yoo-hoos, some wooden matches, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of Wonder Bread. The clerk totaled up his purchases sullenly and put them in a paper sack. Minerva bought a quart of Dr Pepper and two Milky Ways.
They returned to the car. Micah drove to the cut. The old trail was still there. Micah popped the trunk. They unloaded their gear: a rifle, sleeping gear, a lantern, and flashlights. Minerva handed Micah his backpack from the trunk. Its weight surprised her.
“What you got in there, Shug? Pet rocks?”
They shouldered their packs and made their way through the long grass to the head of the trail. They had to move slower on account of Ebenezer’s limp.
The sun hung above the western hills, shining with a dull glow that cast no shadows. The air was still, but a sweet breath came from the woods rowing the hillside: a mild note of camphor. The twittering of birds, too: only a few, but at least some animals were about. The path followed a gradual rise. They could spot no signs of the old fire. Everything was thriving, in fact.
Minerva twisted the cap off her Dr Pepper. Ebenezer broke into a commercial jingle as he limped along.
“I drink Dr Pepper, don’t you see,” he sang in a redneck twang, “as it’s the perfect taste for meeeee…”
“Whatever you paid for singing lessons, it was too much,” said Minerva.
The two of them needled each other simply to hear themselves talk—anything to push away the silence, which had become heavier as they forged deeper into the woods.
They stopped for a rest. The woods did not feel quite as hostile as they had fifteen years ago. Had they actually hurt the thing back then? Micah could not credit that. He wasn’t sure something like that could be injured or killed because he was unsure if it was truly alive. But more than that, it just seemed so ineffably old that, whenever Micah turned his mind to it (which was not often, because even his thoughts scared him), notions of it ever dying seemed farcical. Something like that existed outside the bounds of time and scale—outside human bounds, anyway, and those were the only measurements he could apply.
“Are we ever going to talk about that part of it?” Minerva said. She must have read something in Micah’s face.
“What part?” said Eb.
“Whatever happened down there in the dark.”
“With the…?” Eb started.
“Yeah, the…”
Minerva trailed off. It was hard to say what, exactly, they had been given. Wishes? Is that what happened? Had they been granted wishes, like the old story about the genie in its bottle?
“‘The Monkey’s Paw,’” Eb said.
Minerva nodded. “You read it?”
“A few times,” said Eb. “Seems rather apt.”
“But what…” Minerva grimaced, her brow beetling. “What did we ask for? I don’t remember saying anything. More just something kinda bubbling up from way down inside me. Something I must have wanted real bad. And that fucking thing granted it.”
“Mine’s not so hard to figure,” Eb said. “I wished to see the face of God.”
Ebenezer wiped his nose on his sleeve and took a sip of Yoo-hoo. He stared at them imploringly, as if hoping the other two would understand—intimately, in their marrow, knowing the way he knew. Ebenezer had been so desperately scared. Those moments, in that place beneath the world, had nearly broken him… or had broken him, in a way he was unable to unravel or give voice to or properly grapple with. Like a greenstick fracture of some invisible bone—a vestigial one, the bones we all had as children that fused and changed so that, as adults, we have a different number of them in our bodies. That phantom bone went snap. The cleave was clean and flawless, as if a surgeon had done the work with a bone hammer. And that little bone was unhealable—it was forever broken, the jagged ends grinding together inside his mind. Looking back, Ebenezer was unsure that human minds were built to cope with any of… of what happened down there. He felt no shame thinking that, either, as he did not believe humans were built to come to grips with anything that existed beyond their conventional means of reckoning. When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world—its reasonableness, its fixed parameters—well, their minds crimp just a bit. A mind folds, and in that fresh pleat lives a darkness that cannot be explained or accounted for. So they ignore that pleat as best they can—it, and the darkness it holds. But it’s always there, always seeking redress.
“I wanted to see the face of God,” Eb said again. “I must have. I was not a religious person, as you both know. I killed for money. But in that moment, all I wanted was to know there was something larger than myself up there—a benevolent god to protect me. If not my body, at least my immortal soul.”