Read by Oliver Yellop
You will think you are safe, when you see me. You will take in the white robes, the feathery wings and the halo, and you will think your troubles are over. Little will you know that your troubles will have only just begun.
By the time I arrive, you will have been there for a few days, in the lower place. Time has no meaning there, in Limbo, but it will feel like a few days to you. My associates will have visited you by then, made certain promises and certain threats. I will have told them not to touch you, but what I am not there to see, I cannot prevent.
So it will be a shock, when I take the seat opposite you and smile my blinding smile, when the ties cutting into your wrists remain fastened and your ankles stay bound together. You’re supposed to help me, you will say, you’re a ….
Yes. I know what I am. I know the order to which I belong and my exact place in the celestial hierarchy. And you must know yours, which is somewhere in that vast existential hinterland between an angel and an ant. And that’s all you’ll ever be. The truth is no matter what you do you remain on whatever rung of the ladder you began on. You cannot change what you are. Some might rise to favour and others fall, but the hierarchy remains. Seraphim, cherubim, throne, the rest of the angelic host, a vast yawning gap, and then somewhere down below there is your kind, so far down the ladder you have barely left the ground. And there you remain. We must have order, and that order must endure. And that, of course, is why you are here.
Funny place, Limbo. Used to be, the only souls you would find here were unbaptised infants and virtuous pagans – Socrates, Plato, Virgil and the rest. But that was before we made our arrangement with the lower place – our deal with the proverbial, so to speak. Before that, the only torment here was the denial of hope. There are those who say such a state renders all further torture superfluous.
They would, of course, be wrong.
You will doubtless say, at this point, that you led a good life – not blameless, but who was? You did a bit of shoplifting in your youth. You kissed that girl or that boy when you were already supposed to be with some other girl or boy. You drank more than you should have more often than you should have. You didn’t give much to charity except when pushed, never volunteered at a soup kitchen like you said you would. You found some money and kept it.
Good, good, I will say, keep it coming. And then I will leave, and my associates will close in. You know their kind too, and I am certain you have an understanding of their position in the cosmic order, with their cloven hooves and horns. They play a little closer to their stereotype. You will scream. Everyone does.
At this point, you may be wondering about my accent. You may be asking, are all angels English? Well, there’s an old joke among your kind. They say that, in hell, the French are the bureaucrats, the English the cooks and the Germans the police. But in heaven, the Germans are the bureaucrats, the French are the cooks and the English are the police. And that is why I sound to you as I do. I have always found it most effective in my line of work for engendering a sense of trust. The English are renowned all over your world for their sense of fair play, after all – from Kenya to Calcutta, from Belfast to Basrah. I jest of course, but that is a joke on which the sun never sets.
Some more time will pass for you in Limbo while I am gone. You will remain in your place of confinement, sitting in that dark room, hands tied and hooded, listening to the noises from the other cells: the screams and the pleas. You are not alone here. Even in this suffering you are not special. In truth, the threat of violence is often more powerful than the violence itself, but devils are unsubtle creatures, and impatient. You have a body in Limbo, and when I return to you, it will be bruised.
I will ask you again, about your life, about what you did with it. You will have had time to think, perhaps to become a theologian in my absence. You will tell me He knows all, sees all, so why the questions? I will laugh. Truth is, He hardly sees a thing that goes on down there, where your kind live. His attention is not on you and never has been. He is looking elsewhere, if his eyes are open at all. Do you believe everything you read in books?
You will say to me that I am the same as them, the devils. You will say there is no difference between us, and I will laugh again. It is easy to tell the devils and the angels apart: the angels are the ones speaking with the English accents.
You will perhaps start to cry at this point. Maybe even plead. There is little point to it. Your soul must be weighed, your trespasses not forgiven but paid for. I must assign you to the right place. Your answers are a matter of cosmic security. You will tell me again about the shoplifting. There was a little more of it, wasn’t there? And it wasn’t just a kiss with that girl or that boy. And it wasn’t just once. And you lusted, yes you lusted all your god-damned life. I will smile again, thank you for the information, and you will scream at me as I leave. Scream till your throat nearly tears.
The next time I see you, you will be considerably less likely to argue. The devils will have run the gamut: from stress positions to sleep deprivation. All interspersed with some good, old-fashioned beatings. I will guide you to a chair and wrap you in a blanket. You will feel my goodness like the warm summer sun, and I will whisper consolations as I sit you down and ask you again to tell me what you did.
You will probably sob. Most do. And at this point I will explain to you that, if you refuse to tell me, there are others I might ask. Your partner, your son, your mother, your father. I can pull any of them in, whenever I choose, and then I can throw them back in the pond if I want, give them a little near-death experience and a lasting trauma. It’s up to you, I will say. It’s just dreadfully important you answer my questions.
You will talk about Him again, and about his son. You will use words like love and peace and forgiveness. All that stuff you yourself professed to believe in but never acted upon. Truth is, your kind have been great teachers to us. From whom do you think I learned my techniques?
It goes two ways from this point. There are those who break and there are those who buck. There are the ones who tell me everything, every sordid little detail of their pathetic little lives, and there are those who lift their battered heads and spit their hatred at me with whatever spirit they have left.
This latter course, I cannot advise.
The devils will pick you up and push you to the floor. They will hold you there, and one of them will place a bag over your head. Your world will go dark, your breaths will become shallow, and then the water will start to fall. Down it will come, splashing against the rough cloth and causing it to cling to your mouth. No power of reasoning will dispel the feeling of drowning, no rational thought will convince your mind or body that your lungs are not filling with fluid. You will gag and choke and kick, but I will not let you up. Not yet.
It’s a strange one, this last technique. Nothing devised in the nine circles of hell can beat it for eliciting information. It was your kind’s great gift to us, and I must thank you for it. You have always been expert in the art of inflicting pain upon each other.
Most don’t last a round or two. It is too much for even the strongest mind to bear. When you have suffered enough, I will remove the bag from your head and kneel next to your dripping face. You will be shivering with fright, gulping at air, and I will lift you up and hold you. And I will look in your eyes and know that I have broken you.
And then it will all flow out like a tidal bore: the thing you wouldn't talk about, the thing you could never face, could never even admit to your own reflection in the mirror. And don't pretend now it isn't there, lurking in the dark places of your soul, buried by the years but brought to light by me now, dredged up from the muck for heaven's eyes to judge. Don't pretend you don't know of what I speak. I know it is there. I have seen it in the eyes of every last one of you.
So my advice to you is, when your time comes and your trespasses are finally held against you, unburden yourself to me. Let us avoid all of the unpleasantness that so often comes with wresting the truth from your kind. For whether you yield or you resist, I will find the secrets you have buried.
And I will know, at last, where it is you belong.
(c) Rhys Timson, 2021
Rhys Timson is a writer from Zone 5, a sci-fi dystopia that closely resembles suburban outer London. His work has been published in 3:AM, Litro, Structo, Lighthouse and other literary magazines and appeared in Retreat West’s 2019 and 2020 competition anthologies.
Oliver Yellop is an actor from Essex and a graduate of both The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. Oliver has performed extensively across the London stage appearing in plays at The National Theatre, The King’s Head Theatre, The Southwark Playhouse and The Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch.
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