The Journey of Captain James Flecker

My name is Flecker. Captain Flecker – or at least I used to be a captain. Right now, I am stranded in a strange land, having made a deal with a particularly nasty demon. This is the result of an escalation of events which started a long time ago, each increasingly desperate palliative leading to an outcome that required a more drastic measure. It does seem likely to me, however, that I cannot possibly plunge any deeper: I am in Hell, after all. I must be! – although there’s no objective way in which I can justify such certainty, save that its grip on my soul is, in itself, sufficiently tangible.

The only belongings I’ve got left are these frayed garments and the ship’s logbook. My retaining the logbook after being sent here suggests that the demon wishes that I keep record of my progress in writing, which I’d feel inclined to do regardless. There’s also the contract – or the thing he called “contract”, though it’s little more than a dried piece of kelp with symbols cut into it, barely readable. When I took it from his crooked hands, the “contract” was blank save for a handful of demonic ciphers, but I do now realize that a short message has recently engraved itself on the surface of the kelp: “You shall need to travel a thousand miles”. Very well, then.

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It was not long before I abandoned the fruitless practice of keeping track of time. In this land, light emanates from unlikely places, and it is mostly absent where you would expect to find it. That is, unless one stops expecting to find it, in which case light manifests for just long enough to fill one’s heart with strangeness and discomfort. Apparently, nature itself goes to great lengths to see that the denizens of this underworld are adequately oppressed.

All in all, Hell has proven to be as barren and dismal a place as one might expect, given the ample literature on the topic. Nevertheless, it has become obvious that the vast majority of authors were never given a proper chance to know what they were writing about... but then again, had they been given this unpleasant privilege, their writings probably would have never ended up in the hands of avid readers such as myself. It must indeed be exceedingly difficult for the damned to crawl out of Hell and back into the realm of the living, and those who do succeed should bear no fervent wish to glance backwards, let alone act like bards of the Abyss. It seems logic to assume, therefore, that the most vivid and genuine accounts must have either never made it back to the mortal plane, or vanished forever into dark crevices in the minds of traumatized fugitives. Although I haven't yet experienced such depths of crippling terror, these considerations cast a long shadow on my own future.

The ominous quality of these thoughts is given strength in the fact that, despite my being reasonably well-versed in demonic lore, my experiences in the nether regions have been largely of the more... unexpected nature. After years upon years learning the ways of demon-worshipping sects, the secret names of deities as well as their respectively peculiar appetites, the emptiness of Hell is… well, almost disappointing. Of course I knew better than to expect the proverbial lakes of fire and acrid brimstone fumes, but… there’s only this thick, moist, almost solid darkness instead. It must also be noted that, when I employ words such as “empty” and “dark”, their meanings shouldn’t be taken literally, for this is possibly the most exasperating aspect of Hell – it is overwhelmingly elusive. Therefore, “emptiness” should not be interpreted as “lack of environmental features”, which are in fact varied and abundant, but rather as the direct impossibility of making an objective account of these features.

For instance, one might think I could endeavor to describe the rock on which I’m currently seated, or the gnarled stem of a nearby tree, or the odd-looking animals that seem to be perching on its dead branches, but the effort seems infinitely pointless to me – so much that it effectively prevents me from doing so. Somehow, pointlessness – or the perception thereof – inflicts a physical impediment on my attempts to perform certain actions. And this dreadful sense of futility permeates everything, from the pebbles beneath my boots to the dim, perpetual radiance far in the horizon (on whose colors I find absolutely nothing to write).

I can still walk, and so I do, even if there’s virtually no indication in my contract as to which bearing I should pursue… which may be just as well, I suppose. It doesn’t feel as though one can reliably follow bearings in this miserable place. Thus I press on, in search of something whose shape and purpose remain concealed from me, awaiting its moment of revelation.

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Changeable and seemingly inscrutable though this desolate underworld may be, there are patterns. There must be! – Otherwise it’s all just chaos, and Hell isn’t just mayhem and utter disarray; in fact, I’ve laid these eyes on landscapes so symmetric, so blatantly architected with a deliberate lust for minutiae that every next minute of contemplation only deepened an already profound discomfort on the observer’s part. No, Order and Chaos are mere actors on this dark stage, and they too must play their prearranged parts.

At any rate, patterns. One of the first things I noticed was the Hunger. Everyone is famished… yet again, not necessarily in the literal manner. ‘Hunger’ should here convey a much deeper and more urgent need, something akin to a combination of addictions, passions and all the unbridled appetites of the human race; a suffocating thirst that inflicts on its victims a slow, poisonous wound, making them live in desperate craving for something that is only ever obtained in too small doses.

At last, there is the Silence, but once more the word falls short. Thus, it is more like the fundamental and inescapable subversion of all meaning, which perhaps only the keenest and most sensible of minds may hope to resist.

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Obviously, I am not alone in this place. Not much has been said of the physical dimensions of Hell (and perhaps not much CAN be said in this respect), but to me it seems vast, illimitable and borderless, and densely populated notwithstanding. There are humans, as you would expect, and some of the non-human inhabitants do resemble humans in shape and form, even if their actual nature is diverse. Wary that the mockeries might resemble humans in behavior as well, I was taking some effort to conceal myself.

In time, however, I’ve come to realize that I haven’t got as much to fear from exposure as I had suspected at first. Amongst my co-damned, few seem able to perceive my presence at all. Fewer yet have bothered with more than a puzzled glance. Still, there is noticeable interaction between clusters of individuals, I suppose, even if most of it strikes me as largely nonsensical.

For instance, I have recently chanced upon a group of five women. They marched in a circle, holding large stones fast against their breasts while singing softly to them, as mothers do to their infants. A sixth woman sat outside the circle, wielding a large, dirty knife in one hand; yet rather than being in a position of authority or control, the outsider looked as though she feared the blade.

Gaining confidence from my quasi-invisible condition and moved by some dark urge, I approached the bizarre ritual. The knife-wielder looked positively horrified; she clutched the knife in her right hand and stared at it with a fanatical gaze, trembling and sobbing and conversing (maybe pleading) with some unseen entity in a language that was unfamiliar to me. The stone-bearers marched and carried a low chant all the while, each one oblivious to anything that wasn’t their respective burden. An odd thing to behold, no doubt, but not by far the strangest scene I had witnessed in Hell till then; and yet something in the way they went about their business chilled me to the bottom of my soul: The easy manner in which they carried the stones, their loving tone of voice, the afflicted knitting of brows… it was all too authentic, as if – whilst under the effect of this trance – they were actual mothers, and the stones their adored offspring.

I meant to back away from this grisly spectacle, but a loud sob from the knife-wielder drew my attention. She was then on her knees, her left palm pressed firmly against the cold wet ground, and with the knife in her right hand she leaned on it, as if preparing to slice off the limb. The look on her face was one of haunted dread, her frantic breath disrupted by convulsive sobbing. I watched as she gave an audible swallow and shut her eyes so tight that her face almost imploded. The knife went down, the fingers came off. After a terrible moment of silence, the woman shrieked in agony, dropping the sharp instrument and plucking the bloody sticks of flesh from the mud. She then tossed them at the center of the demented circle, where - I noticed - a pile of severed fingers was forming.

At this point, the stone-bearers ceased their march. They fell quiet and turned all towards the center of the circle, in what looked like a well-rehearsed motion. One by one, they seemed to come to their senses, as if emerging from decades of hibernation. They rubbed their eyes and gave long stares of utter bewilderment at their stones. I understood it before they did, and yet could not force myself to stop watching.

Reality sank in, the illusion unmade, and the women soon wept in the recollected knowledge that there were no children, and they were in Hell. To this day, the memory of such realization as it dawned on those lost souls remains one of the most hauntingly tragic things I’ve ever witnessed and one whose full description I can never bring myself to conclude, for it rends my heart. I shall only remark that as they writhed and howled in paroxysms of sheer wretchedness, I noticed that each woman lacked various bits of anatomy – and this image became the firewood that fed my nightmares for a long time, as I wondered and guessed, unwilling and fruitlessly, at the aberrational nature of their game.

I should endeavor to mind my own business from now on. There was never anything I could do for them, and to witness such pointless misery has produced a slight but permanently embittering effect on my spirit. I can only try to be thankful that my understanding of the whole thing was limited, if any vestige of gratitude might be found and kindled.

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I have been here for so very long. I have trudged the beaten paths, too weary to write, for what feels like years, now. Has it been that long? Yet I haven’t walked much. Most of the time, I just sit and contemplate things, memories, fancies. In this place, they are as solid as the foothold on which you stand, and there is a beckoning of sorts, a paralyzing tune perpetually playing in the distance, as if warning against a greater danger, the deadly peril always inhabiting all the small things.

Most of the souls who wander in the vastness of the Abyss do not perceive each other, this I am convinced of, and only thanks to my disciplined and sensible mind am I able to avert complete alienation. Therefore I have encountered other sufferers, on days when my own spirit was not excessively encumbered, and exchanged brief words that, in hindsight, did not constitute any form of real communication. Once I stumbled upon a plague-ridden man lying by the murky river, muttering something about a book. I fed him some of the stinking water from the stream, as he appeared to be very thirsty, and inquired about the words he uttered in his delirium. His reply, surprisingly firm (given his feverish condition), came as such:

"In the attic of our old house there was a lamp, one I'd completely forgotten about. I found it one day, and I lit it and when the tiny flame came to life, it revealed nothing. There was nothing. And it was clear to me that everyone and everything, all the wicked and all the wholesome things are made of the same nothingness that filled that room. My heart too, and the fabric of my soul... there is nothing but smallness and void. Gods save me! Will you tell my wife, and my son? Tell them I love them. Tell them to forgive me. I am so sorry. I want to see her. I want to see our baby..."

These were his exact words, before he collapsed into a state of catatonic whimpering. I wonder why I am able to remember it so vividly, whereas I do not have the smallest recollection of places and things I have seen much more recently. Or is it the other way around, and all the things I cannot remember actually happened before I met this man? In any case, this chance encounter strengthened my belief that Hell is not only (and maybe not even specially) a place for the wicked, but also for the weak and the wounded, those fallen through the cracks, victims of their own doings, damned to fail and die; executed without executioners.

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Hell is defeat. Sheer and utter defeat, as your most sincere efforts count for nothing, and the reward of every willful deed is a vicious mockery of its intended result; as every step taken is the start of a journey in the wrong direction. It has recently occurred to me that it is probably too late, too late for me, and I'm damned to roam or sit around (what difference will it make?) the bleak wasteland of the Abyss for centuries without end, or until the final dissolution of my conscience into madness. Maybe some day my thoughts will have strayed so far from the birthplace of human experience that I might become like an animal, and embrace ignorance and oblivion in full measure. I do not know. I do not know.

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I had given up, as I embraced my defeat and lay in complete surrender to the finality of my fate; welcoming a sort of liberating comfort in knowing I was done for, I did not wish to be found. And this is how he found me.

“Not often do the living wander these realms”, he said, “You must be a most exceptional sort of idiot.”

The idiot nodded feebly, apparently not yet as indifferent as he wished he was. I felt broken, less than human, wretched and lethargic. I did not wish to be addressed, let alone by someone armed with the truth. I wanted to have never existed but, since this was impossible, I wished for the next best thing – oblivion.

He sat on the dark sand next to me. He told me I did not belong there. However, I had stopped hoping, and paid him no heed. He carried on his side of the conversation anyway: “I look at you and I see a scholar, a seeker of knowledge. I mean, perhaps this is what you were, once. Right now you are not much of anything, yes? You’re a drifter. Tell me, what is your name?” But I could not conjure the energy nor did I care to utter the answer. All meaning had leaked out of me.

“I see you no longer believe in anything”, he observed, producing a book and placing it at my feet, “What a shame. Well, this could help you. You do not need to be here.” 

There was a sincere quality about him which got through to me. Almost immediately, I recognized him as a demon. Thus, I was saved by the knowledge of a largely ignored fact: A demon almost never lies. Indeed, while demons can be treacherous and deceitful, they are usually also very mindful of the words they utter, and hardly ever resort to concocting lies, which they consider crude and tedious instruments of manipulation. In the light of this knowledge, a tenuous hope was rekindled in my thoughts.

He gazed upon me as I sat pathetically on the dirt and grabbed the book. His parting words were: “Do not let my kindness go to waste. Kindness is a costly thing anywhere, but here it is especially so.”

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It took me a long time to become aware of the physical changes effected on me by my time in the Abyss. It took a heavy toll indeed, it changed me in ways I would not care to describe. I saw it while I held the tome passed on to me by the demon. I saw it in the hands that held the book, unable to open it. Were those my hands? Perhaps sheer revulsion gave me strength to crack the solid layer of dust that had collected on my skin. I reached for my pocket and retrieved the piece of kelp. 'You shall need to travel a thousand miles'. I'd ask the gods for strength, but I know better. I need to be the provider of my own strength. I shall open the book tomorrow.

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There was nothing. Hundreds of blank pages, and why should I have expected otherwise? The utter banality of my disappointment made me laugh. It was a joyless, hollow sound that conveyed no familiarity with my memories of myself. 

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I have been here more days than I could count. Then again, there are no days, no moons, no flow of time to speak of. But there is decay, so there must be time. Perhaps it would not be too surprising if one did not require the other. At any rate... this. This is terrible. How did it come to this?

I need to keep my wits about me. There has to be some sort of consistency in all of this. Some law, anything. I will open that book again, and it will show me. It has shown me pictures before, awful and cryptic ones, meaningless, unknowable. It wants me to see, I think, but not with the eyes I have now. It wants me to grow new ones, and leave the old ones to rot.

I stare at the pages for years at a time, but most of the time what finally crawls out of them is just awful, it speaks with me in ancient tongues only a few men have ever spoken in the whole of history. A few days ago I could make out words.

It was time to call off the eclipse,
to put out the black fires;
Word was sent to ghasts and djinns
to bid them furl the banners.
By decree of the Invisible Wyrm,
a sweeping summons was issued.

A poem without meter. History? Prophecy? It goes on and on, this incomprehensible narrative, across hundreds of thousands of verses. Strangely, I think I could recite all of them from memory right now, whereas the features of every person who was ever dear to me are all but vanished. A pious aquaintance of mine - whose name has also been claimed by this famished dimension - used to say, 'a god giveth, a god taketh away'. I was never fond of these words, for they seem to imply that gods are given to follow their whims (perhaps they are, I wouldn't know). It just occurred to me how wholly appropriate the saying is with respect to this place, in the fact that it does not so much 'take' as it 'replaces'. It has begun to drizzle.

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I was floating. Seems like all I do is float now. On dark rivers and freezing lakes and acrid clouds of vaporized blood. On swarms of winged teeth, on landslides of ash and smoldering saw dust. So I was drifting, belly up, carried in a stream of something that reeked of month-old milk, and who knows maybe it was old milk; I could not see its color, on account of the night being so dark. My body sailed in such complete blackness, in fact, that I could see stars up in the void. It was the first time I'd seen stars in the Abyss, and I felt like it was a meaningful thing. I'm sure stars don't belong in Hell, but don't ask me how I know it - I just do. I've come to know many things, things nobody has taught me about the secret nature of this place. It's as though these bits of knowledge find you and lodge beneath your skin like splinters, and then they dig into the flesh, deeper and deeper, and they twist you. It must be a spontaneous thing, and that is why any time spent here takes such a terrible toll. The splinters do not come out. You can never unlearn. And now there are stars. Beautiful, cold, distant, twinkling fireworks from another world. To be able to see something from such a tremendous distance... and to crave, to covet it. 

I moved for the first time in decades, and raised a palm to grab those shiny dots. Air, emptiness, the promise of home. I must have mumbled words. I must have said something, but the sound I remember was thunder, and then the darkness quivered, and ominous shades pulled a blanket upon the star-sprinkled ceiling of Hell. And the blackness of the lightless void wrapped itself around my body, and sent forth a dissonant whisper that chilled my skin: 'Not yet'.

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Maybe it is funny that I should write this – for I have forgotten a great many things, but still, yes, I suppose this is funny, worth grinning at – that in truth (such as I perceive it) I must admit, I had not been afraid until now. The person I used to be must have been either simple, tragically misguided or utterly delusional, to operate on the assumption that he could undertake this journey and emerge... whole. Or relatively unscathed. I am not wont to think of him, it vexes me to do so; and in the process of renouncing that man who doomed me to be here, the vacuum of my existence demands some sort of resolution. Here I stand, shattered, strangely wiser and – perhaps because of that – only now frightened. The twilight thickens, and I realize there is almost certainly no possible redemption left, no alternative, no solution, no time, no hope. That I might’ve erred too deeply, and had too many thoughts that would have better been left un-thought. That perhaps I am no longer an inmate of the Abyss, but a denizen, one who belongs. Could it be true? Yes, it could. It is. I am. The most telling evidence is a chilling acceptance of my condition – tempered by fear, yes, but also a numbness of the heart that must only come with exceedingly old age. I am suddenly aware of my arms, and the wrinkled ash that covers them.


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