The Book of Limbo

Chapter 2

It was the acrid smell of stale sweat, sickness and medicine, like being in the intensive treatment ward of an asylum.

A knot quickly formed in my stomach, tying together all my doubts and fears into one unified weight that settled heavily within me. On numbed impulse, I turned to close the window behind me only to hear a voice in the darkness.

"No...leave it open."

I instantly turned to face the words, my nerves racked. I strained to see past the creeping moonlight dusting the mound of blankets on the bed with ghostly light. Then something moved from among the folds, and I couldn't help but recoil as a pale withered hand emerged into view and wearily beckoned me to approach.

As I took a hesitant step deeper into the room my eyes finally began to adjust to the darkness and I could just make out the pale vestige of a face watching me from the shadows.

"Oh my god..." I whispered as I realized what it was I was seeing.

My little brother smiled weakly at me from where he lay.

"I was wondering...when you would show up..."

All I could do was stare in cold shock, my mind rejecting what I was seeing as fast as my eyes absorbed the sight.

No...It can't be...this can't be real...

A lesson for facing a hard and unexpected truth:
You will deny it. Then you will realize the futility of denial and deny that too. You will deny everything until there is nothing left except your denial. And then it will be too late.

His skin was wax, the hair straw plastered to his forehead my sweat. The yellow eyes that looked at me from hollow sockets were encumbered by a weariness I didn't think possible, as if they carried the weight of everything they saw with them. His hand was skeletal, the paper skin stretched over the bones like a snake's shedding skin; too tight, too thin.

"Kota...I don't...I don't understand." Is all I managed to mutter.

"A lot has happened...since you've been gone." My brother whispered. His voice was hollow, as if he were nothing but an empty shell.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Is all I manage to ask through the lump in my throat, choking my words.

"Never got..a diagnosis." He whispered, "Mom never brought...a doctor. She said..I was in God's hands."

"Of course she did." I muttered sourly, his words rekindling an old anger long buried in my heart, it's heat already coursing into my veins and tightening my hand into a fist. I guess the old fires are the easiest to start again.

"This isn't right Kota. You should be in a hospital. Let me take you, let me-"

Kota silenced me with a weary wave of his hand. "It's too late for that. Mom already got...what she wanted...It's all up to Him now."

"We don't believe in Him. We've never  believed in Him." I hissed.

"Yeah, well...death has a funny way...of reevaluating our beliefs."

He looked to his left, towards his bedside table where a bible rested propped open next to a pile of other books. I read their spines; the one on top was The Inferno, the first of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, followed by Purgatory and Paradiso.

I pulled Inferno off the top and it fell open to a bookmarked page. It was an illustration of Dante and Virgil standing before the Gates of Hell as depicted by Gustave Dore. The words etched in stone above the infernal portal read: