Robert C. Caster Jr. was widely known throughout Thomasville as a diligent worker, a generous host, and a responsible citizen. Success at work allowed parties at the house, the abundance of food, and the scores of friends - accomplishments Robert worked hard to cultivate. Never being satisfied in the norm of the moment, Robert enjoyed commanding and holding the attention and respect of most people he met. You might even say it was a pre-occupation of his. It didn't matter what he did, or how much he was being paid, Robert was driven by never being satisfied unless he perceived that at least someone was gauging his worth in the most favorable of lights.
There was also certain man named Larry, who was deformed from his birth. Larry could neither speak like most people nor did he have complete use of his left hand. In Thomasville, none were more disadvantaged than poor Larry. People saw disadvantage as Larry's main occupation and the only means by which Larry was able stay alive. Staying alive by other people's charity, Larry would say, required of him a certain sense of duty to his benefactors. So Larry prayed blessings on all who gave to him and his blessings were well known among the faithful, for God seemed to honor them.
So when Robert C. Caster got out of work, as he did every Friday, at 5:00 PM, joined his co-workers at the factory and passed through the northern security gate of the complex on his way to the parking lot "A". And as usual, he had with him, his entourage of people anxious to hear juicy tidbits they could take home and talk about. Robert was just about to deliver the punch-line to the joke he had learned while surfing on the internet, when Larry interrupted.
"Got any left-over's for me and my buddies Mr. Caster?" Larry always used everyone's last name.
Robert resented being constantly singled out, all because he made the mistake of giving Larry the contents of his lunch box after a busy no-break work day. (No-break work days were frequent, because of the government's latest order for new parts came in.) At the time, he had felt good about his generosity, but since the hobo's were ripping apart the garbage bags looking for such gifts from above, the company installed a locked dumpster and the employees were encouraged to toss their leftovers into the dumpster instead of handing them out to the street people or throwing them away in a garbage can that could be toppled or torn apart.
"Not today, buddy...", Robert lied.
"Oh, that's okay, Mr. Caster.", said Larry. "I appreciated that Twinkie you gave me last week. I love Twinkies! Thank you Mr. Caster... You have a nice evening!"
Robert wondered why those people had to speak so loudly. It's not like they can't work... Laziness shouldn't be rewarded. He made it a point to show the entourage that he put his leftovers in the locked dumpster before heading to his car. The snickers meant that his message was sent and received. Larry didn't notice - somewhat to Robert's disappointment.
Then one day, Larry was by the north gate, Mr. Caster was walking with the usual crowd, when unbeknownst to them all, a small crack in the joint weld of a liquid oxygen tank was finishing its year long journey to failure. And the fact that a corroded ground wire had stopped directing static electricity to a safe place caused the day to take a horrible turn.
For both men, the curtain of this life closed, and the curtain of what happens to the souls of people, opened...
The resulting explosion was heard in nearby Clarkson, 20 miles from the blast area, and was measured on seismographs as far away as Denver. Mr. Caster didn't feel a thing, one moment he was there, then next moment he wasn't. Larry was less fortunate than Mr. Caster, his charred remains were found behind a concrete pylon, still clutching what looked to be a piece of chicken bone.
The messengers who came to Larry, who was now standing erect and full of glory, gently held him by his arms and lifted him up to see his Friend, He whom Larry had talked to, faithfully, each day he was alive. Robert, the talk of Thomasville was also standing, but was standing before a freshly filled ditch, dug near the compost heap his gardener used to empty the fish gut pail from the kitchen. The messengers who came for Mr. Caster, hooked him by the flesh just above his shoulder blades and cast him before the Judge, whom he neither knew nor recognized.

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

There are so many things to say.

However I have been granted a limited time to write you. (It seems the warden has made an exception to his long standing ban on letters from inmates. Don't ask me why... I wasn't allowed to even look at him when I was called to his office.) So read carefully.

Remember when you started going to that youth group at the church on Baker Street? You came back and started to tell me all about how excited you were to finally meet some good friends. I scolded you and told you that religious people were to be avoided. I said that guy who supposedly rose from the dead was a myth and a crutch for the un-educated. I can still see your face after I told you they were just pretending to be your friend, what they really wanted was your money. You were angry at them and joined in my disdain.
Remember when your mom and I split up and I told you she became a religious zealot, one of those "holy rollers" and I could not abide in the same house with someone who was such a hypocrite? I can still see your eyes then, too. But I told you to be strong and that you could still love your mom, it's just that she has problems with religion and if you were strong, you could avoid the same fate.
Son, there were so many people you and I met over the years that tried to "convert" us. But I helped you stand strong. I told you that if you became one of those religious people who believed in that guy who died and lived (for some reason I can't bring myself to write his name) that we couldn't relate any more. That we couldn't pal around, get drunk at the club, go skiing on Sunday morning, or any of that stuff.
By the time you were in your 1st year of grad-school, you had independently confirmed everything I had told you. You even helped Tracy understand that churches were institutions of oppression. When you brought her home to meet me, we briefed her on your mother, telling Tracy to be careful and avoid any discussion on religion. We laughed out loud when you told me about how she excused herself from the table when your mother started to pray for the meal. (I still don't know how your mom got to her, though.)
As hard as it is to believe what I am about to say, I think its best that you don't end up like I did. Let me tell you about this place...
After the Judge confirmed the verdict, I was placed in shackles and loaded into this portable cage called "the basket" by the driver. (He had such a sinister laugh that it caused me pain, just to hear it.) While in the cage, I was accompanied by others who were sharing my same fate. They all looked like I did, depressed and devoid of all hope of ever seeing the light of day.
My cage was brought to a way-station where it was loaded onto a train. The train was ominous and dark as pitch. It belched out smoke from its stack that was yellow and left a taste of sulfur in the air. When the hundreds of other cages were finished being loaded onto the train, the train began to move. The train gained speed and steadily made its way around mountain and then descending into a valley. Just before we arrived at our destination, the grade began to steepen, going into a tunnel.
Fear was now gripping me and this train load of inmates. I was afraid, we were all afraid, because it was getting darker and hotter. As we descended the heat became so intense, the cloths I was wearing when I first came to the court room were starting to smolder. I couldn't close my eyes, they were so dry and tearless. The soles of my shoes were melting as the bottom of our cage began to softly glow with a radiant heat. Everything now, around me, was an angry orange color. By this time, my cloths were on fire and being consumed. The clothing of the others, in my cage, were also now being engulfed in flame. I couldn't breath, I couldn't close my eyes, and I couldn't move away from the heat, it was all around me. I bit down hard, so hard, in fact, that my teeth shattered. I tried to grab onto the gate of the cage, but it was even hotter than the air around me and I reeled from the pain.
My sentence was now becoming more real than I could have ever imagined. The guards on the train began to howl with each passing junction. The one guard that was on my car, looked at me with a grin of unspeakable cruelty. "This is your stop, Bob!" The gate to the cage flung open, and the guard motioned to the door of the cage and cursed me. For some reason, the flames that were licking my flesh, were now all around me, in my lungs, lapping at my face, my legs, my body... I was tossed out of the cage, off of the moving train, and I tumbled though the air onto the jagged rocks jutting up from the floor of the cavern. I hit them at such speed that I was torn asunder - and yet, miraculously, was whole again, in an instant.
THEN, as I stood, I looked around to survey my new surroundings. Everything was glowing with a sparkle of heat and gas. Just beyond the rocks where I stood, was a small clearing, a flat area where there were others. As I headed towards them, my eyes beheld the faces of the (*)(*)(*)(*)ed - souls lost in their sufferings and lamentings of things unspoken.
Then to my great satisfaction, I discovered I was not alone! There he was! MY FATHER! Your grandfather. The man who told me this place didn't exist!
I was moving now, over the jagged crags and towards this man I once held in high esteem. Trying to ignore my agony I rapidly descended to meet the man who brought me here.
But before I stepped foot onto the terrace I was met by a tormentor. A winged, red-skinned devil with horns and a beak, yet was neither man nor beast. He razed his sword as if to hack me in two if I moved one foot closer. So I faced the tormentor and begged him for his smaller sword, still sheathed. The tormentor withdrew it from it's sheath, and thrust it into me like I was a cooked turkey. Ignoring the fact that I received no mortal wound that would end my suffering, I withdrew the blade from me and began to advance towards the man who gave me life in this place of eternal death.
Standing in front of him, with the guard's sword in my hands I looked at my father with a hatred that seemed to soften my physical suffering. The more I envisioned attacking him with the tormentor's weapon, the temperature inside what was left of me, was soothed. So like a man near death from lack of water, I ran towards this oasis and drank from the pool. With all my might, I caused that blade to flash from above my head to the skull of my father. Just as his unflinching head was about to be hewn in two, his hands rose up from being clenched fists on his sides to completely halting the fate I intended for him. His hands, pancaked on either side of the sword, I could not move, the blade seemed as if stuck in stone. The tormentor laughed. "Your blade, Bob!" it said as it walked away howling in even louder laughter.
Robert Sr. was a formidable man in life - ruthless in business, always managing to play the game better than his opponents. Standing just over six feet tall and with a booming voice, the board room was his personal play ground and his associates were all pawns to be played as a small orchestra. If he liked you, he would promote you to a place that best suited him. If he didn't like you, then he would make it obvious that no one else should either. And if you didn't go away willingly, then soon going away was the only choice you had. That man, that power house of unflinching ambition, was now a blackened form of charred remains, like I - seemingly lifeless.
But lack of comely form or slightest motion doesn't mean the snake isn't ready to strike. When he clasped the sword, I stood there for a moment, and gazed upon my father like a man looks when he turns on a light in a darkened room and finds he's unexpectedly not alone. The gritty sound of his movement as he stood, was the same sound logs make in the fire when moved with a poker. As he rose, I expected his eyes to look at me, but there was no light, only fire in those sockets. And now fully erect, he ripped the sword from my clasp and quickly thrust it into the rock that was beside him.
He began to speak, with a raspy voice I recognized as my father's:
"Hate me?! Despise me?!" The coal that seemed to be fueling his bowels erupted into a slightly brighter flame, from within. (Cont Next)

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

"YOU TOLD ME THIS PLACE DIDN'T EXIST!!" I shouted in a similar voice to his own.
The eyes of this man who once told me that to get ahead in life was to take care of your family by amassing a great fortune and sticking it to the other guy before he sticks it to you were now filled with the flames of hell itself. I suddenly felt the urge to feel my own face. To my shock, my eyes could see, even though the places in my skull where they once were, was as vacant as those of the man I stood before.
We spent some significant time, after that, tearing at each other like wild dogs. Imagine, ceaseless energy, fueled by hate, driving two (*)(*)(*)(*)ed immortal souls to endless combat. The more I tore at him, the more enraged he became and the more he tore at me in response. In this place, hate causes the pain to lesson, when you channel that hate onto another person, you find even more release from your afflictions. The only thing is, the other or others you fight, have equal incentive and the brutality you inflict on one another is a different pain, more intense, yet not as lingering as the constant searing you feel when not focusing your hate on some one.
At times I would see writhing balls of forms barely recognizable as humans, ripping and tearing at each other with extraordinary ferocity. Feeding and being fed on by their fellow inmates, full of torment, and whaling and gnashing their teeth on the bones of their kinsmen.
Eventually, I discovered that the constant searing is more bearable then the "hair balls" of vengeance that grow less frequent with those who have been here for a while. Most find their own little corner and sit, and focus on managing their grief in solitude. I found this to be predictable, at least. Fortunately for me, most of those I influenced for the bad, my wife influenced for the good and didn't have me to hunt down and attack like I did, my father.
So I am writing you this letter in hopes that you will see the errors in my words and deeds and avoid coming to this place. Not for the sake of you, because I hate all the living for their slim but ever present hope that they will not come here. I write this letter for my own sake, for your hatred of me for leading you here could only rival my own hatred for my father, for sharing his fate with me.

Father...

Epilog:

TO THE PRINCE OF THE AMERICAS:

The inmate author of this letter to the living, managed, over the last two terrestrial centuries, to etch out the above letter in the rock inside his cell block. Since his father was transferred to a lower level, due to legions of inmates interned here as a result of his work for us, Bob Jr. no longer has any who seeks to torment him, it is therefore demanded of the ruler of this realm that he be transferred to solitary where he will spend the remainder of his sentence.


TO THE CAPTAIN OF THE FIRST LEVEL GUARDS:

Ensure that he does have some company. I put a bucket of lava worms on the next train, see to it that these keep him awake in his new home.

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

The author of this short story is me. Since there were so many posts regarding the eternal destination of the human soul, I thought it would make for interesting conversation.

I apologize in advance for how edgy it may seem, but the concept, I believe, is sound.

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

I refuse to worship something merely out of fear of what might happen to me if I do not. Scary stories are a lousy inducement to faith.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Bad Christian puppets scare me, though. But, I guess that's their job.

I don't fear dying. If your god is as described in the bible, he's a sadistic ass, and I will never bow before him.

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I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls.

Why did you choose Off-Topic Chat to post your story? Do you want to discuss it from a theological or fictional standpoint? If you want a theological discussion, may I move it to the Religion forum?

When you say the concept is sound, do you mean that the Biblical (physical) description of hell is described well?

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt

If you lived in a Kingdom with an autocratic monarch. And you had to go before him, because your neighbor and you had a dispute. You knew that he set the rules, he was the final judge, and if you violated any courtroom procedure, he would put you to death, on the spot. Would it be prudent to bone up on the rules? Ask some people who know how it works, to fill you in?

Or would you just walk into the court-room, give him the finger, and die?

Just curious...

Now, on the other hand...

If that same ruler, after observing your deed, forgave you and let your whole family live, and sent His only son to die in your place. Would you not be the slightest bit grateful?

The thing created, can't possibly say to the creator: Why have you made me this way? Showing the utmost contempt, then bemoan his fate.

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

This is your choice. It makes me sad to hear you say this.

I wrote this story to illustrate a point. The rules have existed for a very long time. That's the way he chooses to set them. He offers you a pardon for a fate you have already earned. You can take it, or you can leave it. The choice is yours, (contrary to Calvin's errors) but make no mistake, like them or not, they are in place and His justice is sure.

Why would anyone be sooo proud as to shove such a gift back in the givers face? I pray that God brings you both to a place of humility, so that you can see the free gift that awaits you. We all must admit that we did the crimes we stand accused, is it so hard to accept that there is a pardon available?

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"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution." March 4, 1869, Grant's First Inaugural Address

I had to ask how you wanted the story discussed because as creative fiction, my requirements are different - you know like the style, emotions evoked from the writing, whether it paints a clear picture etc. BTW, you get an 'A' for all that.

I don't have much knowledge of what hell might be like. I think of it as a place without God and as such quite unpleasant. I feel a PM coming...

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Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive. - Theodore Roosevelt