Reaper School

CHAPTER 4: Hell's Supercomputer

Hell's Supercomputer
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"I'll take it from here, fleshie," Death whispered in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler's knees into jelly. Unlike Charon's voice which had sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death's was working on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness sent shivers up and down Aris' spine. It was the perfect voice from beyond the grave, gravelly and frosty, and made Death sound like a gangster; a gangster of the most real underworld there was.

The elevator boy made the sole little mistake of doubting what he had just been told and looked over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swiveled his head 180 degrees so Alaris finally saw that for a face he had nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a perfectly smooth, round mass of flesh.

The face was heartrendingly crude, like the work of a preschooler drawing in dirt with a stick. But once those inanimate peepers locked on Death (whose own face was still hidden from Aris), they bulged. No demonstration could be more literal for the word "eye-popping." From the taut skin, vitreous humor the size and shape of billiard balls jumped and dangled at the end of raw, exposed nerves; like the special feature of a Ghostbuster action figure, only more graphic.

To help him hold the expression, the exact spot the elevator boy was standing on collapsed like a trapdoor and he disappeared into a neat black square; that is, the whole of him except for his innards still attached to the ceiling. First, they stretched like the longest suspenders then like the instant slingshot that they were, they flung the fellow straight back in and through the ceiling in a blur, creating his own jagged emergency exit. The unfortunate soul left with a final, reverberating snap.

All these things were made possible by pure psychokinetic energy, which Aris feared to be only one of his visitor's many abilities. Worse, he sensed that minus the elevator boy, they were now alone in the car. This last thought filled him with cold, paralyzing terror. He imagined this was how a mouse would feel when placed inside the cage of a python. Around this character Death, violence was wont to run wild like in an episode of Tom and Jerry, but the acts were much too real to be funny and instead they were just shockingly cruel. Then again there was something strangely right about a Grim Reaper that was funny in his own twisted way.

Like the world's saddest, bitterest punch line, it turned out there was in fact a panel of buttons to control their oversized bucket of an elevator. And right now that was where Death's dainty human finger proceeded to type in a secret code. Soon after, everything began to tremble ominously.

Then the elevator dropped like a boulder.

Aris couldn't tell just by looking at Death though. No matter how fast and askew they were, the reaper stood as erect and elegant as a general in the bombed frontlines, the back of his hood still turned to Aris. The elevator walls were revealed to be made of glass once they slipped out of their shaft. So, with a stomach-lurching, top-of-the-world view spreading out beyond his toes, Aris prayed that his VIP box be impervious to boiling magma because that was squarely where they were headed.

Past more unspeakable exhibits which he was fortunate enough to be spared from on this all too real ghost ride, they finally came to the last circle of hell. As Aris had imagined, there was a whole army of giants looking down from ledges as they continued plummeting at breakneck speed. But everything in this part of the netherworld was in titanic proportions that even though they did, Aris didn't miss a thing. In fact, if the glass walls of his prison weren't rattling like tin roof in a hail storm, he'd think they were traveling in slow motion.

Buried here in the very center of the earth crouched mammoth Satan in the shape of the most malformed and hideous beast: inky fur, three heads and three pairs of membranous bat wings. There was magma all over the colossal walls but the ground, the middle of hell itself, was built on smoking ice and Lucifer, the Ultimate Betrayer, was buried to the waist in it. His trio of jaws were chomping down on three other major personalities: the heavyweights, the senior and most coveted inmates of hell. (One of them he thought was Hitler.) And as Satan cried with his six bloodshot eyes, his tears mixed with the blood of these VIPs.