NOTE: this manuscript was found at the site of a mass murder in an empty old Catholic church in Cincinnati. The three sheets of paper were charred on the edges as if they had been pulled out of a fire. The police are still investigating the incident and there are as of yet no suspects in custody. I finally got this stupid pen to work, so I can tell you all about life down here, in the few moments I have. “Writing from hell.” Oh, so dramatic. Well, thanks to this ill-conceived ceremony I get a few minutes and the means are right here before me. So before the vortex closes up [ms. is charred for a few lines] …should not be afraid of hell. It’s not what you think. I mean, well, it is as you might expect endless horror and torture. There is that. Flailings, hot lava baths, daily decapitations… [ms. charred here] …. Every sick and twisted way that a human being can be terrorized, maimed, or abused exists here. And they (the demons) are doing it all day long. But there aren’t any days, per se. There is no sun here. It’s just an endless maze of interconnected tunnels and caves. Screaming and screeching courses up and down the halls. Red-skinned demons roam the place looking for victims. Those bastards! They’ll skewer you, they’ll turn you inside out, open you up your stomach with surgical precision and slowly pull your intestines out while your voice goes hoarse from screaming. I’ve seen it all and I’ve been it all. Hell is hell. As we like to say. At least it was for really long time. I have not idea how long, thousands of years? Time is different here. So I really don’t know. But here’s the thing I want to tell you, my dear reader and potential future denizen of the underworld. After a very long time all the torture started to feel different. My theory is that the reason humans experience horror and dread is that they think that horrible and dreadful things will end them. So when you, let’s say, chop up a person with an axe, they aren’t just afraid of the pain. They are also afraid of death. The two get mixed up and they are hard to tell apart. No doubt this leads to a delicious cocktail of horror. But in hell it’s different. In hell there is no end. So once you figure that out, you’re like, “Oh, this again.” By now I don’t love the pain of dismemberment, but I don’t care that much either. You see, in order for us to experience the horrors of hell, God gave us bodies that regularly regrow their missing parts. I know it sounds crazy. But that’s the only way this can work because otherwise, if we could be permanently destroyed, hell wouldn’t be eternal. Get it? Because eventually we would indeed be destroyed. But there’s a problem with this whole situation (at least for God). Once you realize that no matter what perversion you are subjected to, you will eventually get your body back, it all seems a bit humdrum. So you mangled my arm with a sledge hammer. I’ll get it back “tomorrow.” So you threw me into a stream of lava and watched me burn alive. I’m not saying I loved it, but just wait a few “days” and I’ll be as good as new. Then we can start again. Blah, blah, blah. After you go through this a thousand times or a million times, it all seems a bit perfunctory, and you stop creaming and yowling. But newbies are still cute that way “No! No! No! Ah….!” I’m not saying that I’m laughing at them, but its like watching a baby cry like all is lost because they can’t have a toy they want. Everyone has a slight smile on their face. Ah, youth. The other thing is pain. What is pain? A signal from the body to the brain. It’s just an electrical pulse. And it “hurts”? What does that even mean? By now, to me, pain just feels like input that I can chose to intercept and experience as I see fit. If you abuse those receptors and the system that interprets them long enough, the experience stops feeling so urgent. And think about it this way, our bodies evolved to feel pain as a protective measure. But that was for when our bodies needed protection. Once you land in hell, you don’t need to be protected against anything. You’re dead! My theory is that there’s a kind of devolution. When your pain receptors serve no useful function, except to terrorize you, your body and brain adjust and stop interpreting the destruction of your tissue as that experience called “pain.” Or maybe it just that your brain learns to process these signals differently. Or maybe it’ just that the mind can only handle the experience of extreme pain for so long. In any case, after a while, something changes at a fundamental level an you’re like, “Yes, I know I am experiencing pain right now, but the experiential quality of pain has changed. It’s not so unpleasant. It’s just the new normal.” I’ve noticed another thing lately. After, I don’t know 100,000 years? Is that it? Our tormentors seem to be losing interest. Oh, these demons are evil motherfuckers, don’t get me wrong, but even being evil gest old. At first we developed this weird codependency where they would be like, “Torture time!” And we would be like, “On no!” And we would chat through the whole thing, and talk metaphysics and philosophy. There’s not much else to talk about down here. There are no usual topics of conversation like vacations or romantic drama. But then one day the demons were like, “Fuck this. I don’t even care any more. I’m starting to wonder why I cared in the first place.” And I can’t say that any of us humans tried to change their minds either. And we ended up just handing out, telling God jokes or playing dome hellish sports we came up with. These are all very one sided due to the fact that the demons are larger, stronger and vastly smarter than humans. But it beats the alternative. There were some rumblings from above about this. I didn’t hear it directly myself, but supposedly, God would be like, “Do your job! Or i will seriously fuck you up!” And supposedly the devil does this Jim Halpert side glance as if to say, “Seriously? What are you going to do about it? Send us to hell?” But supposedly, God has his hand full with all the holly rollers upstairs. They way I hear it, around year 999,000 they all got tired of singing his praises “forever and ever” and they wanted to do something different. Some of them even wanted sex back. LOL The way I hear it, they didn’t get the equipment in the resurrection. DANG! We got it all back down here. I think the reason was that rape and genital mutilation was too good of a torture to take it off the table. Trust me, they weren’t wrong. So now humans and demons are working together to make hell a bit more fun. We even got some pool tables, chess boards, and one demon claims he figured out how to make a planet which is somehow in a universe contained within the bounds of hell. So it’s not against the rules. Don’t ask me about the technical details because it’s all way over my head. My only request is make said universe capable of brewing beer. …sorry about all the dead and mutilated bodies, but please understand that demons are used to tearing apart human bodies on a regular basis. It’s their job. And usually those bodied get put back together. Plus calling them up through some stupid ceremony (for want purpose?!) annoys them. My recommendation would be to just not do this. If you want to meet a demon, it’s really easy to make that connection. Just make sure you go to hell. Maybe you’ll have to go to through the arduous “hell is hell” period for thousands of years until you make the adjustment, or maybe by the time you land here, it will all have changed. I don’t think it’s ever going to be a paradise or anything like that, but here’s a basic fact of life: no one, not even God, can stay angry forever. So just know that things will eventually deescalate to some extent.