White and Other Tales of Ruin

I thought about this, wondering just how we were supposed to take this journey as a healing exercise when we could still talk. “I’m sure your son still loved you, even at the end. My Laura will have been brainwashed to forget me. Love has no place in the sects … not for anything outside, at least.”

The woman didn’t respond and I said no more. I finished my beer, each mouthful more rancid, and then I opened one of the meal containers and ate salmon in white wine sauce. It was real salmon. It melted in my mouth and released the sterile taste of mass produced fish that had never swum in a river, never known rapids. A smaller container held a slab of apple pie and custard, but once opened I could not bring myself to eat.

I suddenly felt bad, being able to eat and drink after what I had just seen. The scenes outside looked so very real. They smelled and sounded totally genuine. I’d just seen dozens of people dead and dying, and I was ready to sit back and drink bad beer and eat salmon. I looked around guiltily, but the woman across the aisle was chewing thoughtfully on a mouthful of something, and from the seat before me I could hear the unmistakeable sounds of eating and drinking. I glanced across at the woman again and caught her wry smile.

“I wonder what’s next,” someone said from further along the coach. Their voice was muffled and dull, and I wondered just how large this vehicle was. I shifted in my seat but the straps held tight, as if aware of my sudden interest in looking around.

“Titanic,” someone answered, their voice even quieter. “I’ve always wanted to see the Titanic going down.”

“Natural disasters make for good viewing,” the first voice said. “Give me a hurricane or earthquake over a war or riot any day.”

Be patient and you will see, said the voice in my head, and it must have spoken to everyone because silence fell once more.

There was a sense of movement as we were transferred from one scene to the next, but I could not tell how fast we were travelling. It wasn’t like a ship, or a hover train, or an aircraft, because there were no sounds at all to indicate that we were passing along rails or through air turbulence. The sense came from inside? an occasional dipping of the stomach or a twinge in my inner ear. I wondered how far we were travelling and just how big Hell may be, when the windows brightened once again and I was faced with the answer.

Hell was huge. If it had boundaries they were scores of miles apart, at least. It had sky, and land, and dazzling sunlight. And when it came to pain, suffering and death … it knew no boundaries.

Perhaps even now Laura was being lectured in the traditional Hell, the metaphysical place where wrongdoers suffered and punishments were meted out, and where Satan presided over his flung-down domain, plotting vengeance, scheming to re-attain his rightful place amongst the angels. But however thorough her brainwashing at the hands of the cult, they could never show her this. If she were here with me now, then she’d believe. Then she’d know that Hell is of our own making, and we have been manufacturing and perpetuating it on our own planet ever since we crawled from the primeval swamp. The place I travelled through was simply a bringing together, a distillation of all bad things.

I looked from the window and felt sick.

Be glad you aren’t here, the voice purred, and I began to cry.

The coach was moving slowly, painfully slowly, across a wide open plain. In the distance a row of snow-capped mountains pointed at the sky like a giant bottom jaw. The top jaw was a line of dense strato-cumulus clouds hanging threateningly across the whole horizon, waiting to close at any moment and bite the scene away. The plain itself, for as far as I could see, writhed and flickered and shifted in and out of focus, and at first I thought my tears were distorting trees and bushes and setting them moving. But I wiped at my eyes again, pressed my face to the window with my breath held … and I saw that the movement was people.