It seemed like he fell forever. Somewhere on the way down, he lost his grip with Johnny Dovecrest and the two men were separated, but he knew his friend was beside him, falling down as well. He felt like he was dropping like a bullet, with no end to the fall in sight. Everything around him was a piercing black that no light could penetrate, and he felt the wind rushing past him. He never had minded heights, but falling terrified him; he tried to close his eyes and pretend he was floating, but his stomach had different ideas. It was all he could do to keep from vomiting, and his head whirled around as if he’d been in a centrifuge.
At last the speed of the fall seemed to slow, and he began gliding, or so it seemed. Tentatively, he opened his eyes. In the distance far below him he saw a black opening, surrounded by a cherry-red circle of what appeared to be hot coals. He wasn’t sure if that was where he came from or where he was going to, but the opening seemed to be getting larger. He could now vaguely see Dovecrest’s shape beside him. The Indian flashed him the thumbs up sign to indicate he was all right. Though Erik didn’t feel all right himself, he flashed the sign back.
He tried to speak and, even though he was shouting, no sound escaped his lips. It just seemed swallowed up in this endless, vast expanse of nothingness. There was no sound and no light other than the cherry-red glow of the coals below.
Finally, they landed on solid rocky ground. It was, in fact, the same kind of black, polished obsidian that the altar was made of. Only this was a virtual sea of volcanic rock. It went on for as far as the eye could see, downwards towards the black hole surrounded by hot coals. It was as if they were standing on the rim of a giant funnel leading downwards with a fire-ringed opening at the center. The center looked miles away, and it didn’t appear that there was anything here except that endless black rock.
Erik wasn’t sure what he imagined hell would be like, but it wasn’t anything like this. Hundreds of millions of tortured souls, perhaps. Sinners being cut or burned or ripped apart by monsters. Endless pain and suffering. Fire and brimstone. Whatever vision he had of hell contained people, people who had sinned. He had imagined hell contained people like Adolf Hitler, Caligula, and Vlad the Impaler. Rapists, murderers, serial killers. He’d imagined there would be millions of sinners, from the most notorious criminals to those who simply did not believe.
But this place was empty, barren, devoid of any life whatsoever. This version of hell was an aching void of emptiness and loneliness. It was silence and it was aloneness, the ultimate form of solitary confinement with miles and miles of hard, barren landscape and no where to lie your head. It was like being on the moon, but with no spaceship and no way back. And it would be like this for an eternity. He would have preferred the fire and brimstone. At least it would have been something.
For the first time he understood what it meant to be eternally separated from God-not only God, but all of his creations.
He looked at Dovecrest and saw the same thoughts reflected on the Indian’s face.
“It’s worse than you could possibly imagine,” he said, and realized that his voice could now be heard after all. “I was expecting Dante and his circles of suffering. Not this. Where is everyone?”
“Oh, I suspect they’re here,” Dovecrest said. “Probably by the millions. But this place is so vast, so infinite, that they won’t ever find one another.”
“Then how will we ever find my wife and son. And that awful thing that took them?”
“Your wife and son are alive. They don’t belong here. They’re not damned souls, remember? And for that matter, neither is that demon. At least not damned in the way we know it. We’ll be able to find them. They will stand out.”
“How do you know that?”
“Simple,” the Indian said. “You can see me, can’t you?”
“Yeah. So what?”
“If I were a condemned soul, we’d never be able to find one another and communicate. Not even if we were standing just three feet apart. That’s the punishment, don’t you see? Eternal banishment-from everything.”
Erik nodded. In a weird way, it made sense.
“All right,” he said. “Where do we begin?”