The Final Devil

 Harrison was falling. Whatever he imagined death would be like, it wasn’t it. It was like someone opened a chute underneath his bed-ridden body, and he fell down through it and kept falling further through blackness. 

An explosion of sight and sound knocked him out of his numb state, as he beheld the red skies filled with twisted, tangled pillars of black, oily smoke, and the desert filled with black, shiny slag, ash, and bone fragments. He let out that scream of utter horror and pain, as he scrambled up from a small crater his falling mass had punched in the surface of hell.

Because it was hell. There was no other way to look at it. Not that Harrison didn't expect to end up anywhere else if there was an afterlife at all. There was one, it turned out, and he knew damn well for a death-row murderer like himself there would be no other destination.

Harrison felt like the impact had broken every single bone in his body. Yet, he discovered he was able to power through the excruciating pain, and stand up. He would soon learn that this was one of the special features of this place. Every pain, of every single injury would never go away, but add to the pile of suffering of the damned soul. The body would mend almost instantaneously, allowing for more wounds, and even more pain. Now he felt the coarse, searing desert was burning the soles of his bare feet. It took every bit of Harrison’s will to stand up straight and look around.

The only thing that offered any distraction from the all-encompassing vastness of the burning, red desert was a lonely dark spire in the distance. Not only was it the single navigation point Harrison could use to orient himself, but it also offered the only sensible destination  to make for if he chose not to lie down in the fetal position and wait to decompose. The fact that almost a third of the ground’s surface was covered in shards of bone and gray, calcified dust was a grim reminder that many damned apparently chose the latter.

If there were any chroniclers in hell, Harrison’s travel would make for quite a tale. Once he started his pain-ridden, slow, but deliberate stride, the desert began to uncover its secrets. He found villages cut out in red rock, inhabited by tribes of cannibals. He understood their hunger and found that his own was greater. He came across armies locked in thousand-year battles in the name of Hell's oligarchy. He saw corteges and processions of the damned dancing a disharmonious, mad dance until their legs would grind to nothing on the sharp gravel.

On his way, he's seen such marvelous nightmares, such terrible dreams, that by the time he stood in the shadow of the spire, there was nothing left in him that used to be Harrison. One thing he never saw in the infernal realm was even a single devil.

He knocked on the spire's black, cast iron gate, and as it opened up to him he took the first step on the spiral staircase. It took him a hundred years to climb to the chamber on the uppermost floor.

In the crimson throne room there sat a figure in a white, porcelain mask. Curved horns rose thirty inches over its head. It remained silent and as Harrison approached it stared at him intently.

"I've been waiting for you for a very long time" - said the horned one. "I expect you have many questions."

"Just one, actually" - Harisson shrugged at the sound of his own voice, realizing he had not heard it for decades. "Where is the real devil, you shameless impostor? The one that makes all the damned into these mad monsters?"

"Makes them?" the figure chuckled. "You really thought someone needs to make them that way? There are no demons here. I don't think they ever were."

Harrison rushed towards the throne and reached for the stranger's neck. It snapped like a dry twig. The mask fell off his face to reveal one that of an unremarkable man in his fifties.

The new lord of Hell sat on his throne, putting on the horned mask. It was going to be a long, lonesome wait.