The Nun of Hell

The Nun of Hell

Your fluids have laid down one foot below. Maggots made a feast of your guts and marrow around your corpse. Nothing for earth, nothing for Heaven. Your remains are now all what is holding you back from nothingness...

You resigned yourself to death with the insight of a brave man. Your strengths running out of steam announced a no return and you watched them deteriorate with the fatalism common only to the wisest. Nevertheless, would you have taken it otherwise, it would have been exactly the same.

God has decreed that man would never be more at finish than what he was at start. Only evil power is able to go against that implacable rule.

You are in Hell. Thus a strange game begins to take place around your bone remains. First a jackal came over you ; it threw up on your location and ran away. Now maggots are coming along. As if moved by a unique will, they gather around the pit where you had been thrown.

It is a wide and dead plain in the silt of which your mortal remains had been laid down. On the bank of a broad dark river, your corpse had been roughly buried. Among mosquito larva it has slowly decomposed and eventually mixed up with original excrement, divine raw material.

How come ? There is not a single sinew left to feed on. Yet the flow carries on. It is even getting bigger. They come by the Myriad ! And the small worm gathering soon turns into a crowd, an entire people of corpse decomposers.

They come from everywhere, from all azimuths of the globe.

Entire processions move and converge towards the one point that is your grave ! Some are from faraway regions. Others even come from the other side of the river, perched on a drifting corpse.

Among them, a few wear the finest attire ; with their red capes and their tiny heads circled with golden ribbons, they look like kings or priests.

It is all too clear. They had fed on your flesh. Now they are preparing a Big Mass.

All have arrived. In great pomp and ceremony, a ballet starts all around your remains. Something is being set up and begins to take shape. They wriggle in a circle when suddenly, one among the biggest and best-dressed stands up.

Thus the agitation stops. He twists boisterously, lays down on his stomach and stands up high for some kind of call. This is the great priest. He summons his congregation and fellow beings with an apparently gross but nonetheless efficient commotion. In unison, the tiny worms spew out all your substance. In one retching momentum, they give back what they had fed from. That ceremony may just be the Big Mass of your resurrection ?!

The guts crawl between your dried ribs and assemble in there. The fluids stagnating down below climb back up and sit back in your organs.

Your hair winds and plants back on your skull. Finally your skin comes to cover the lot while the last membranes close up.

As you lift yourself up on your elbows, you raise the mud lying on top of your head and in a long and violent breath, you inflate your withered lungs.

They have had communion of the flesh on your corpse. Now, in the act of that great gathering, they give it back to you !

As if animated, the rejection flow of what used to be your body gets out of a state of indistinct mush and, enveloping progressively your bones, turns back into muscles, sinews and guts.

300 years may have passed since you died. But – is that worth reminding it – you are in Hell, which, whether it is a place of pain and lamentation, still is as eternal as Heaven. And in eternity, two days or 300 years, that is roughly the same thing. And indeed, it is like waking up from yesterday.

Fresh with your mind at rest, you feel as hungry as a wolf. Everything would be just fine if you were not covered from top to bottom by that repellent mud with such a recognisable putrid smell.

And there is no way you can even think of getting rid of it by bathing in the river since the river itself carries the mud. For as mystical as it may be, this stream of forbidden banks is but a sewer ! And you can easily imagine why the beloved who used to cross it had to ask for Charon the ferryman's assistance and why the damned never thought of swimming across to get to the celestial resorts.

So here you are, as naked as the day you were born. As you pick up a twig in order to scrape off what you can of this excremental mud, you start to realise that you are lost.		Only animals seem to inhabit the place. Vultures attack cast away corpses while mice continually get in and out of food tins. Cockroaches and snakes search an old mattress. Further away, a rat family plays around a rusty cooker and relishes a few lost bugs coming out of the oven. Another clan has invaded an automobile carcass turned upside down and set themselves against the fabrics and plastics with their tiny teeth. The consumer society rubbish came to disfigure up to the dusky beauty of the Styx banks.

The furthest your eyes can reach is on a large stretch of blood shaded horizon, which is an oozing scar in the impenetrable sky darkness. There is no probable entry to the Nun's grounds. On one side, if you climb up the four feet mound that opens out onto the muddy shore, you see a desert; on the other, there is that river of which width is difficult to assess and that is obviously impossible to cross. Only a faraway red gleam reflecting on the venomous water lightens the set and it is just like a hot lava flow splitting this world in two.
		The mixed smells of chemical secretions from our factories, the garbage thrown up by household economy, the disposal of everyday utensils and gadgets and their dumping in this water gave it its distressing stupidity.

That is why you decide to prospect further down the desert. It is still only rocks as far as the eye can see. At times, a brief moan of air brings a mineral spray on your shins and the sensation produced is not unpleasant. Now you know how to get rid of the mud that is still stuck to all the parts of your body : sand, which you roll on the dried dirt on your skin, makes it turn into dust. So you become nearly spotless and, as you look up, you see a hare in front of you. Standing up on his behind, the animal is staring at you. The strange encounter lasts about one minute. You could not tell who is watching whom. Then he makes a bolt and sits 50 yards away.

There again, he stands up and gazes at you. Puzzled, you make a move in his direction, and as you arrive sixteen feet away from him, he starts a new sprint and stops another 50 yards away.

You do not quite know if it is a game for him – or for you – but you go along with it willingly for you have nothing urgent to do anywhere else. And the game goes on like this about ten times, so much so that you finally follow your guide to his hole. He disappears in it and does not get back out.

So you resolve to get closer to that burrow. Now, it is larger than what you expected ; the opening seems to be made for a man.

It may well be an entrance to the infernal underground that you must return to, eventually... At the same time, you hear a diesel hum followed by a metal crash racket. You turn over straight away to find out that some kind of half-biplane half-flying saucer aircraft has just landed thirty yards away behind you. A misshapen figure gets out and immediately motions you to come along, waving its arm broadly.	You have lost your sense of direction a bit with all this and you can not tell whether the Nun's lair is under your feet or if it is to be found in the above circles of Hell.
		You opt for the subway.

		You choose the airway.