Wonderland

Wonderland
Chapter One

I am falling down this infinite rabbit hole. All around me are the images of my life, the rabbit hole’s soil walls are a television screen to me, flashing these moments before my eyes as I hurtle towards my damnation. Nothing is left out, from my birth, to my death at the grand age of eighty-seven, leaving behind a beautiful wife, two successful children, three grandchildren and five great grandchildren, I am given a wonderful tour of my existence from the rabbit hole. Despite falling so quickly, this long trip has a slow melodic feel about it. It gives me enough time to realize that the showing of my life in all its glory isn’t the gift I thought it was, but rather the first instalment of torture I’ve received from hell. Satan is showing me the most sweetest candy, and he sure as hell isn’t going to let me keep it. These images are only been shown to me to serve the purpose of reminding me of how worse off I am now, my soul has been sentenced for punishment and he isn’t going to let me forget that fact easily. I have an idea as to why I was sentenced by St Peter to come here, and was certainly reminded of the moment by the rabbit hole. I’ve lived a good and honest life, paid my taxes on time, went to church and loved the family I raised dearly. But, as with every human being, I’ve made mistakes. Well, in my case, a singular mistake. A mistake that has literally lead me to having my soul burn in hellfire for all eternity. A mistake which the rabbit hole just showed me on its muddy walls. And that mistake, goes by the name Alice.

It turns out that God really does have distaste for sex before marriage, and perhaps even more so that I happened to love this woman more than my very own wife. It happened roughly two days before my wedding, I met her at a café where I was having an after work coffee with a couple of workmates from the small newspaper I had just starting working at as the resident film critic. I was introduced to her by Harry, who would go onto being the only other person to know about our night together and keep it a secret for the rest of his life, which sadly ended to years prior to my own. He was a great man and I sure as hell hope he isn’t going to be here to meet me. He knew Alice from school and it just so transpired that on this very day, she had herself walked into this café for a drink as well. It was her who spotted Harry from across the room and came across to say a quick hello, Harry, naturally, being the charming fellow he was, invited her to join us. After about an hour of nice chit-chat, Harry and our other guest at the table James, left for home, leaving me and this delightful and extremely beautiful girl to sit and talk. After the café, we decided to go to a bar for drink, one thing led to another and I was at her place by the end of the night. When I woke up, I sneaked out of the house before she awoke. I never saw Alice again after that encounter, and never told anyone about it either.

The further down the rabbit hole I got, the more intensely hot it got. I could also the faint light of the burning fires of hell at the bottom of the rabbit hole now. The gates of hell would soon be upon me.

I’d been falling for about two minutes when I saw an image on the rabbit hole’s wall that struck me. It was the image of my wife placing the wonderful and luxurious velvet pillow that I’d always had on my side of our bed, under my head whilst I laid asleep on my deathbed in the hospital. She was crying and stroking my now very small amount of dull gray hair, which had at one point been luscious brown locks. This must have been in my very last moments, moments in which I was quite often in and out of conscienceless due to amount of morphine I was on. I would have remembered it being there otherwise. I was first diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago, and she’d cared for me ever since that moment, even during the times when the chemotherapy meant I could barely move anymore. For such an elderly person, she showed such strength, carrying me out of bed everyday when I was in my lowest moments. Cleaning me even. She really loved me, and I had betrayed her.

I could see the gates of hell fully now. They were about sixty feet tall and made of steel. All around them for as far as the eyes could see was nothing but a blank cover of darkness. On the gates themselves was nothing more than a bright red, upside down Crucifix with a decapitated Jesus with his head dangling off of a chain attached to his chest. The rabbit hole displayed one last image before I fell out from its grasp, the image of me breathing my last breath in full front of my family, which I now realise was no more than a few minutes ago. As I fall out of the rabbit hole, I see the ground and begin to scream. I hit the floor with a sickening thud. I look up and through teary eyes, see that the gates have begun to open.

Out of the gates came two figures walking nonchalantly up to me. One fully clad in knights’ armour, the other in a jet black suit, carrying a suitcase. They soon got to me at which point the knight picked me up. Through his visor I could see nothing but smoke and two red eyes. The man in the suit was a handsome fellow, with jet black, slick hair and blue eyes. He opened up his suitcase and looked though a load of paper before finally pulling out one and looking at it, then me and back again.
“Mr O’Neil? Mr Thomas O’Neil?” He asked, calmly, pleasantly and rather business like.
“Yes” I answered hesitantly. My voice croaking through the pain of the fall.
He pulled out a pen from his pocket and wrote something on the sheet. He looked back up at me.
“Good, good” He said. “Nice to meet you, my name is Imamiah and I’m basically here to make sure you get to where you need to be and to explain everything to you. I’m sure this is all very confusing for you. The fellow holding you up is Ajax. He doesn’t talk much, d’ya Ajax?” Ajax says nothing.
“See what I mean, I’ve been working with this guy since the crusades. Barely spoke a word in all that time. For the first few hundred years, I wasn‘t even sure if he had a mouth.”
I chuckle a little bit. The nice nature of Imamiah is really rather rattled my expectations of what worker in hell would be like.
“Right, business first. Imamiah says. “I have a few questions to ask before we set off, take a seat.”
All of a sudden a a desk and two chairs appear. Imamiah sits down and Ajax sits me opposite him.
“First question; You know you’re dead, right?”
“Yes. I kinda figured that.” I reply, sounding a little bit less hesitant now.
He rights on the sheet again.
“Oh good. I hate breaking that news to people. So hard to find the right words. Not really in my job description either. , OK, back to the questions. You know this is hell you’re about to enter?”
“Yes.”
“Oh good. What gave it away? The fires, demon in armour, decapitated Jesus?” He asks, chuckling away to himself. I can’t help but join in on the laughter.
“Well, that and the whole falling a hundred feet and, err, living?”
He gives a out another laugh. And smiles at me.
“Ha, good one. Oh I think we’re going to get on well, me and you.”
“Me too.” I say hesitantly, not entirely sure as what to say to a demon.
“OK, final question; Are you ready to go?”
“I guess so. I never really planned for this.”
“Great. Don’t worry about it, you’ll be surprised.”
He wrote on the sheet once more and stood up.
“Ajax, we’re ready.” He says.

With that, Ajax came and picked me up and carried me though the gates. The first thing I saw was a tent with a sign next to it saying ‘Repair Station’. Ajax carried me and placed me on a bed. He then backtracked and closed the gates. Imamiah came and stood next to me.
“I don’t understand what’s going on Imamiah.” I said.
“Don’t worry, as I said, I’m here to explain. Everything you were told about hell, forget it, most is wrong. First though, we need to fix you.”
“Fix?”
“Yes. Fix. You may have noticed but you just, and please pardon the pun, fell a hell of a long way. You’re body has just been broken and that needs to be sorted before you can start work.”
He looks across the room to wear a middle aged, homely looking woman dressed as a nurse is standing. He calls her over.
“Thomas, this is Althaia.”
“Hello Thomas.” Says Althaia pleasantly. “I’m here to fix you, as Imamiah has surely told you. And I don’t just mean bones. To get maximum productivity from you, I’m going to take away the deteriation your body has suffered from a lifetime of mortality. Basically, I’ll be making you young again.”
I look over at Imamiah. Meanwhile Althaia walks over to a cabinet and gets a small bottle and syringe and begins to prepare it.
“Young again?”
“Yes. Like I said, forget what you know about hell. It is indeed a place for punishment, but those tales of daily torture is very overblown. Torture is only given to the truly evil of the world, not for people like you. Its more along the lines of community service. Hell is actually necessary for the world to exist. We help create the atmosphere you lived in all those years and that is what you’ll be helping us to do while you’re here. And for that, we need you at your physical best, which is why we’re repairing you. We like to call it ‘the last gift’.”
Althaia walks over again with the needle prepared.
“Is he ready Imamiah?”
“I’d say so.”
She looks over me and pulls my sleeve up.
“Now, I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt. A lot. But the end result is worth it, I assure you.”
She injects me with the fluid, and she wasn’t wrong, it did hurt. I began screaming and thrashing about straight away. It only lasted about thirty seconds, but they were thirty seconds more than any man should ever have to suffer. After it was done, they gave me a mirror and I was young again just like they said, about twenty-five years of age. The age in which I probably never looked better.
“You brilliant Thomas, doesn’t he Althaia?”
“I tell you, if I was four thousand years younger!”
They both burst out laughing.
“Now then Thomas, I think it’s time you met your work partner.” Says Imamiah.
“Work partner?”
Imamiah looks at his sheet again.
“Absolutely. Everyone here is assigned one. I believe yours is called Alice.”
I dropped my mirror. “Alice?!“ I borderline shouted. It couldn’t possibly be my Alice, the Alice. But then, accompanied by Ajax, there she was. It was my Alice. It was my Alice in this hellish wonderland.