I will be sent to Earth in one or two days! Unfortunately I am supposed to buy my own ticket to reality - there is no such thing as "allowable expenses" in hell, at least not for an inferior demon. So I went to the Gates of Hell. If you imagine the Gates as kind of a oversize satanist city gate, you are wrong - they pretty much remind of a huge railway station. Hell Terminal.
(Well, in fact, the Gates of Hell don't remind of anything you know, or anything you might be able to imagine. Nothing down here reminds material objects - this is a world of forms and ideas, remember? But in this blog, I am used to use material approximations to describe immaterial entities: The demon with the broken horn, the soul in a jar... And a railroad station is a good analogy for the Gates of Hell, in both function and ambiance.)
The railway station is divided into two parts: The Soul Station and the Demon Station . Soul Station is the bigger part of it. Trains with cattle wagons full of damned souls come down the slope from reality, the souls are sorted on the platforms according to gravity and nature of their sins, poor desperate shapes, whining and trembling, and then driven into other trains leaving down the pit towards the different circles of Hell. Empty trains come back from the pit and return, without stop, to reality, in order to take new passengers. A perfect machine of damnation, a steady stream of damned souls carried down to eternal pain and despair. Wonderful.
I don't know whether there was ever a place like hell up there in reality. If there was, it's gate might have looked somewhat like the gate of Soul Station:
In the old days, there was an inscription above the entry gate of Soul Station: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." It has been removed. The reason is that the act of abandonning hope produces a considerable amount of energy, and this energy is better extracted in the torture centers where it can be transformed into the vital essence of distilled despair we demons need for living. Nowadays, souls entering here don't even know whether they are in Hell or Purgatory - that's what they learn, slowly and painful, in the torture centers. I have been told that some souls take decades to realize where they really are.
Demon Station is smaller and less organized - in fact, it's kind of a mess. The main hall is full of signs supposed to direct voyagers to customs, platforms, ticket counters, waiting areas etc., but as the administration regularly switches places of the different services, not all signs are up to date and you get easily lost. I spent about a hour finding the ticket counters, then two hours in a waiting line - only to learn that this are the counters for trains going down the pit. The counters for reality are on the other side of the station. After another hour in the line I had to convince a huffy clerk that "Strasbourg, France" actually exists. It took a considerable amount of bribe money to persuade her. Then I had to wait another hour in another line because the ticked had to get sealed. Every ticket has to be sealed, Lucifer knows why. The clerk behind the counter does nothing else than sealing tickets, all day long. Of course, he doesn't do this for free, it costs a random amount depending on his mood and the perceived wealthyness of the client. I wasn't surprised, that's how infenal bureaucracy works.
Anyway, I've got my ticket to reality. Yay !
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