Creative Writing: The Myth Of Hell

Great Essays
As I descended upon the field of Somme, a chill trembled down my spine. The trembling nerves and hairs standing up on pale goose-flesh were not from fear of the bullets whistling past my head nor of the walls of gas rolling across the trenches in deadly silence, after all what need Death fear of such mortal things? No, it was my sixth sense, a trait shared among all reapers, that my target was near by.

Settling upon the ground and observing the bleak landscape of no man’s land, I could see a multitude of other Reapers going about their work like silent shades amongst the dead and dying in the trenches. Scenes painted by wars such as this one made busy work days for the likes of we haunted few, perhaps I knew some of those flitting apparitions,
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Just another speck of dust in an endless cosmic void of spinning blackness, the place between worlds neither Heaven, Earth, nor Hell. And then it was gone replaced by the curving walls of the Well. The Well was cylindrical in shape and immense in size, quite capable of holding a small city in it. On both ends were two holes, one that lead to the "eternal grace" of heaven and the other that led to the very depths of hell. I hovered in the middle, longingly gazing at the portal to Heaven, before I reached in my satchel and pulled out the soul. It was reckoning time and I released the soul in the well for its eternal sentencing to either Heaven or Hell. The soul stood still for a moment, confused about what to do, but then it began to float upward to the top before it disappeared from my sight.

I dropped my gaze and was momentarily envious before I heard a blood-curdling scream. I looked up just in time to see a Reaper diving for the portal to Hell trailing a wayward soul and watched as he entered an eternal darkness of pain and gnashing teeth.

Stunned and at this plain "soul-suicide" and decided to ask a nearby trio of reapers about it, one of whom I recognized as a friend from my past life, Todd.

"Hey Thomas", greeted
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Gary saw it, didn’t you Gary?" He said to the last reaper.

"Why?"

“I dunno,” Gary shrugged, “one moment he was sobbing and clutching at his bag and the next he was heading straight for hell.”

“Do you think he knew the soul?”

“Well, maybe, but who could cause a man to jump into the pit like that?”

Todd looked up from his quiet contemplation and spoke up, “well, he did once mention to me that he had a son still on Earth.”

“Naww, you think that was it?”

“I hope not.”

“Why would they make us do that?”

“Why do they make us hang around this limbo, scrounging souls and eternally waiting to be rescued Tom? I don’t know.”

The conversation quickly died from there. The other two reapers eventually went their own way and Todd left for another reaping, leaving me alone with my own thoughts.

I stared up again at the portal to heaven and kept asking myself why a loving god would make a man reap his own son? Would they force me to do the same thing one day?

No magical voice answered my silent prayers and for once I wondered if both portals led to the same

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