A strong, sudden sting of stale and hot, humid air forces its way into his lungs. It’s rancid and sour, bitter and yet sweet. His eyelids pry open. One by one, like too-strong velcro, he feels eyelash after lash ripping away from one another. He suppresses the urge to inhale, but up his throat scratches a cloud of dust and mould. Then, gagging and croaking, his is the first staggering gasp of the dead waking up.
He awakens in a pile of dead bodies. Not dead-but-awake like him, but true dead, gone and done-for. Dead-dead.
Coming back from being dead-dead always sucks. Every muscle feels like cement breaking out from between old layers of bricks. Likewise, the first full rotation of shriveled eyes in dry sockets grinds with the punch of a ripe migraine. It thrashes against his skull, tightens and pinches his neck as if put between a closing monkey wrench wrapped in barbwire.
He struggles to find a grip to pull himself out. The bodies around him are either spongy and soft, or hard like a cock on one-too-many blue pills. Stiff, but not secure. One of them, another dead-and-damned to the Underworld body, crumbles at his very touch. The ankle he sought to use as leverage to pull himself out from the pile breaks loose. A foot hits him in the face. Barely crouching already, he tumbles back and slips on some of the more greasy and bloating cadavers. His head hits something not quite completely rotten. It makes the sound a boot being pulled out of mud would make. Then he begins his decent downwards, headfirst, soaking up the oozes and stenches from the dead-dead he’s surfing on. The foot’s still tight in his clutch.
For a moment he becomes airborne, just to then land on another rotten corpse with a dried out skull and the grin of death across its rotten face. Once upon a time, she must have been a beautifully young woman—torn from life too early by tragedy. Now she’s but a shriveled husk of dried bones and skin wrapped tight around them. A shadow of her former life. A stinking, decaying shadow, at that.
This, or something like this, is how he always comes back.
Isn’t there an easier way to do this?
The air around is thick and weaving, like the heat in a desert. Like a phantasm wanting to be touched before disappearing. Yet, a shiver runs along his back, cold and eery. Sickly-green torches illuminate the caverns—the endless stretches and holes of caves over caves, filled with dead and dying men and women, children, and animals.
Welcome to the Underworld—the final destination of eternal death and doom.
Souls are wailing and whining. They cry like an everlasting choir of misery, accompanied by the orchestra of decay and infinity.
He forces himself to his feet and takes a deep breath of this life-defying air. Then he dusts himself off. His naked skin, tormented by many wounds long crusted over, violated by bruises and tears, throws up a fine mist of ash with every clap of his bare hand.
The heap of bodies is ever growing behind him. More and more dead-dead newcomers are flung from the dark sky onto the top of the pile. Around it, the Underworld stretches in every direction, like a mountain chain. A desolate canyon. To the far distance, a massive black palace rises up against the ill-faded green horizon. There, the mistress of the Underworld resides. The ruler of this place of eternity. The afterlife, the one-stop destination for all and everyone. She’s the Keeper of the dead—bound to the Underworld to rule, judge and punish.
Speaking of the devil. From out of nowhere, a deep, daunting voice appears. It shakes the walls in every direction, trembles the ground. Some whining souls go silent, but most wail more and louder at the sound. Cracking in a deep bass, incomplete as if all vowels are missing from this speech, he can’t understand a single word. The trembling bass echoes in his head, causes a crackle in his left ear. Like an earthquake inside of his skull, shaking his jaw, vibrating his sinuses.
An ancient tongue, far from any mortal comprehension—dead or alive.
He replies, “You really need to work on your hospitalities here, boss. And, again, I don’t speak demon.”
Before him, using the fading trails of uncounted souls as source, a mist appears. First it’s fine, then growing denser and thicker. Until through it puffs a woman, a mere five feet tall. She wears a velvet coat the color of dark-red blood, with a high collar and strange, black markings. Her face is pale and features sharp lines. Unassuming, almost, the way her raven-black hair frames her face—a face that has seen many years and carriers deep wrinkles of maturity to show for it.
She says, “I’m a demon, not, Adam. You know that.”
Adam waves her off. “Sure.”
The woman treads softly as she walks around Adam. Pacing, with one hand behind her back, the other using to gesture with her words. “What happened up there, Adam? You lost control.” She stops in her tracks and stares at him. “Again.”
Adam’s least favorite part. The talk about responsibility and contracts. About deals and quotas. About the value of life, and the necessity of death.
Through hairline cracks by his feet, a ghostly flicker of a soul reaches up to Adam. Translucent, merely more than a whisper of fog above a lake in the morning, the soul begs for his attention. Adam kneels down. He lays his hand around the ghostly cloud as if he was gently caressing its face.
He says, “I do my job, and I do it well. Have I not brought you every single damned soul you asked me to bring?” He waves his hand through the ghost and forces it to disappear. “But I won’t kill for the sake of killing. No matter how much my own life-force dissipates during my stay.”
Adam knows the game. He’s read the contract. Consuming life—living beings, their souls and their essence—is the only way to stay afloat in the world of the living. Should he refuse, his body would fall into a state of decay, until not even his brain function can be sustained anymore. Until the hunger for the living grows to unbearable heights. This is the burden of the Champion—the bounty-hunter of the dead-dead that try to cheat death, making deals with demonic forces. Adam goes through all of that in return for another shot at life, and the promise to eternal rest—and therefor peace—when his term is over. Whatever that exactly means in a world contradicting the mortal workings of time.
“Come with me,” the Keeper says and turns around, walking towards a big, black gate. A gate made not from wood or iron, but from bones and dried blood. After that: the road to the Keeper’s palace.
Still playing with what little trail of lingering plasma’s left between his fingers, Adam follows.
***
Modesty, if Adam ever saw it, surely isn’t the Keeper’s strong trait.
The private chamber is massive in every sense of the word. Each step they take echoes vibrantly throughout this room. Many—maybe an endless number—columns stretch to either side into the far distance, holding up a ceiling too high to be seen. Darkness hangs above like a curtain of dread. That, and a lightless swirl of plasmatic fog, like a twirling twilight contrasting the dark. Green fire, like burning poison, flickers on torches on every second column.
They walk in silence for what feels like hours. The halls are endless, void and desolate. But Adam knows that time means little in the Underworld. It only serves to impress the weak and frighten the feeble. It folds and stretches through his perception, like a rubber band, like a nightmare of being hunted. The faster you try to run, the slower you become. Stuck in tar-like, bending time.
At the end of their march, the Keeper takes a seat upon her rightful throne. An awe-striking construct made from coal, ebony and a touch of human skin. It’s reaching high above, stretching far back, and swallowing the room with its enormous presence. The high reaching back is carved into massive black onyx wings. Beyond it lies a black hole, and Adam can only guess what horrors lurk there. For a moment his sight lingers on that darkness, being pulled in by the eeriness radiating from it, but he shakes it off.
“Listen—" Adam begins, but is cut off.
“Spare me your pleas. Spare me your pathetic whims of morals and ethics. My patience wears thin with you, my Champion.” She leans back in her throne and rubs her forehead. Like the mistress of the dead needs to tend to her migraine, or is able to feel bodily tension.
The Keeper continues. “I chose you to be my will on earth. To execute my wrath and my justice. We had a deal, Adam.” She gestures him to come closer, and he feels to better obey her this time. Once close enough, she takes him by his wrist and pulls his arm up to show the mark on his skin. Merely a faint scar that looks like a cross in a circle, but Adam knows what it means.
“Is this not the mark that binds us, Champion? Does it not remind you of our covenant?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Did I not uphold my part of the deal? Granting you another chance at the life atop? And still, the promise for an eternity in peace after your mission is carried out. Why are you defying me, the Keeper of the Underworld?”
Adam feels the urge to climb on that bitch’s throne, climb up her god-forsaken body and rip her head clear off. Instead, he just says, “Because you tricked me. Because I don’t want this. This isn’t a life. Not even a death. An in-between. A parody. I’m not a murderer. This was not the deal.”
That’s how Adam feels, anyway. In truth, the covenant never stated the true nature of his resurrection to the world of the living. He hoped for a Jesus-like coming-back. Instead, he turned into barely more than a zombie.
Adam feels betrayed. He fell for the coin on the thread trick. Bait and switch. Instead of enjoying a second lifetime and casually following the mission of the mistress of death, he is forced to kill and feed on the living. And not just the ones he is hunting, no. That wouldn’t be enough. He needs to feed regularly, more often than he’s willing to.
“Need we have this conversation again, Adam?” The Keeper sounds frustrated. “You belong here. You’re a creature now bound to the Underworld. Your visit on earth is merely temporary. This is how it is stated.” Her cold fingers glide over the mark on his wrist, until he pulls his arm away, holding his hand over the scar to hide it.
Adam was foolish. Rash, not thinking. He took the mark before knowing what he actually signed up for. A life of unlife. A never-ending death.
The Keeper’s dark eyes stare at him, freezing his very soul with their damned gaze.
She says, “When you took on the mantle of the Champion, Adam, you agreed to leave behind all traces and memories of your past life. Your soul shall not be held in the Underworld, but instead be brought back to a life on earth. In exchange for your services as my Champion, seeking out and returning those defying the will of the mistress of the Underworld, you’re granted immortal existence, as well as the privilege to eternal peace once the agreed-upon terms are fulfilled.”
“I know. I get it. My bad. How much longer do we have to keep up this hellish joke, anyway?”
The Keeper leans back in her throne. “Your mission is to bring back the souls of those that refuse their fate. And, still, many those souls still breath and bask in life. Should you consider doing your job for once, Adam, instead of lingering around until your own artificial life flees from your cadaver, maybe then we could hurry and finish this—how was it—hellish joke?”
He sees no choice. While time on earth stands nearly still during his stay here, Adam spent decades now in the Underworld. Born, died, and reborn again.
“Okay. Send me back. Let’s do this.”
Adam has no idea if his mission would ever end. It’s not like those selling their souls to the demons to cling to earthly riches and other perks would ever stop doing just that. Would ever stop trying to escape this dreaded place.
But hunting them on earth is still a better option than suffering in the Underworld.
The Keeper smiles like a snake offering a luscious apple would smile. An apple rotten to the core. Alive to the outside, and dead deep within.
“Good,” the Keeper says. “But first you need to be reminded of the consequences, should you disobey me again.”
Adam struggles against the cloud of ghastly fog wrapping around him, and dragging him off into the darkness of the endless halls of the Underworld.