The boy was afflicted with palsy, and he trembled when he so diligently moved any part of his body. He was of a foreign ethnicity, somewhat dark skinned and vague in his origins. His irises were as black as his pupils, and there were barely any whites in his eyes at all. He had dusty hair, a skeletal frame and lips that hung and fell about like a fish's. He stood tall, though, and there was a pride in him that could not be denied or stripped away by any sort of disease. When he spoke, his words were difficult to understand, but they were spelled out over his shoulder by an unseen source in plain white letters. His voice rang out with every utterance like a cannon in a canyon, reverberating and monstrous, fearsome in its echoing chorus.

"You've seen nothing so pure as me in all your years of filthy imaginings," he told me, shifting the uncomfortable weight of his head from one shoulder to the other. "I am beloved of the Lord," he said, "a caretaker and no one tolerant of any form of menace or idolatry." He paused and there was a crash of thunder from crimson clouds overhead. "You will not understand."

I had no sense of place, only of scope, and the scope was so enormous that I couldn't take it all in. It taxed my senses and fooled me with illusions, what could only be illusions, of infinite or looping sky, red and ceaseless and grim in their storm muddled beauty. Lightning sizzled its way down, but there was no ground to find, so it just fell from the heavens, lost and spiraling. I tried to understand what I was standing on, or what sort of gravity I was tethered to, but my limited resources of comprehension made it impossible. I didn't bother trying to reason anymore when a cursory glance revealed nothing at all underneath my feet.

"There has been considerable damage, but you are no worse than a million others," the boy said. His voice was monotonous and cruel in its indifference. "Drink these in and when we issue forth edict, you will spill them out in your best recollections." His head swung again, a slamming door or a launched catapult, "Do not force this into jars of butterflies. They will die just as easily."

I. PARADISE

The crippled boy first showed me Heaven. It was a beautiful rolling meadow bordered by gentle hills and drenched in the warmest sunlight. It was vast and it was idyllic and it was empty. The boy, trapped awkwardly in his own body, watched as powder puff formations of clouds drifted by, carried on lilac scented breeze and sometimes cooling the heat of the sun with welcome and blanketing affection. The shade was calm and refreshing. The light was brilliant and energizing. I felt serene, content enough to want to stay there forever.

"You forget such simple questions," the boy said, his words still written in white text above him and translating his broken speech. "This was built for another. You obey them and the reward is not always to your immediate approval."

The boy made two faltering attempts to lift his arm and outstretched finger toward the horizon. When he succeeded, I followed the path of his pointing to a small black shadow moving slow across the hillside. The boy moved with a resolute torpor, dragging himself across the flower dusted fields with me in tow, wondering how to aid my guide.

As we drew nearer, I could see the figure more clearly. It was a shade of a Christ, a negative image of a broken down king, weeping and burdened under a heavy oaken cross.

He looked at me, all white in the eyes, and his tears rained from him, thick and heavy like fountain pen droplets of blood. He collapsed under the weight of His cross, and he let out a cry of agony that shook the meadow under my feet and skittered into the rhythm of my heart, changing it and stopping it for a second, for one brief and terrible moment of pain. With intense resolve, Christ lifted Himself and His cross up again, and moved away from us, back toward the horizon line, and eventually he disappeared from view.

"What begins then is what happens anew each spring," the boy said, forcing his face toward me. His arm swung wildly, out of his control. "This is rebirth."

And suddenly from the ground sprang an array of crosses, each with a pale, jaundiced angel nailed to it. The angels lolled on their crucifixes, their halos shimmering in the still beating sunlight, their sapphire wings lit up by the rays of light streaming through them. They moaned in a symphony, and it was an intoxicating and perplexing sight. The music they created was something awful and memorable, and it stuck itself deep in the folds of my mind, far enough from the surface that I couldn't recall the notes no matter how hard I tried.

Where the angels had been nailed into the wood, blood poured freely from their wounds. It fell in syrup rich cascades to the grassy ground below. The earth drank it, and it soaked into it until the dirt was quenched.

And where the dirt was quenched, moldering bones grew up like yellowed ivory dandelions, skulls and femurs and ribs poking their way up from the ground and toppling themselves into piles at the bases of the angels' crosses.

The boy swung his head in my direction, and carefully slumped his arm toward the skeletal remains beneath the angels.

"The bones of the righteous," he said.

I felt disquieted afterward, betrayed somehow by something that seemed so beautiful and lovely. I had an ache filling me, and I wanted to gut myself, then, remove the sense and the memory and replace it with shredded paper or sawdust.

The boy saw my anguish, I believe, and he removed us to another place.

II. PURGATORY

He showed me Purgatory next, and all of it was sapped of color, so that everything, the boy and me included, was a tapestry of black and white and nothing in between.

"You expect so much gray," the boy said. "You are confounded too much by newly painted mythologies."

It all seemed a wasteland, an expansive floor made of ashes and ground chips of bone, as if everything there had been removed from a mammoth crematorium. I knelt amongst the dust and sifted a handful of it between my fingers. It crumbled satisfyingly. I wiped the excess of it from my palms onto my pants.

"See what waits, there, above us." The crippled boy grabbed a lifeless arm with a painfully functional counterpart and aimed it upward, to a massive pearl and ebony fortress hanging like a pendulum in the pitch black sky. I could not determine if I was swaying while I gazed upon it or if the citadel itself was in motion above us.

He showed me the battlements, then, and the army of robed figures marching in columns along the wide berths of the castle's many rooftops. They moved with the grace and consistency of soldier ants, stepping in perfect cadence to an unheard martial beat, marching in regiments of two by four, blocks of men separated by bits of space, all working in absolute unison, all patrolling the edifice with uniform ease. The folds of their garments even moved in perfect synchronicity. There was not a thing out of place amongst them.

You could not see their faces, the hoods of their robes completely obscured them. Each of them carried a small bag of the world's whitest sand on their hip, strapped over their opposing shoulder on a wide white leather band. They all balanced a gleaming ivory rifle and bayonet in their left hands, keeping the weapon steadied against their necks. The only movement they engaged in was the ceaseless march around the fortress levels. They moved swiftly along the open air corridors, past vast arches that led deep into the bowels of the fortress.

"You avoid what you dislike, always, because wills are so predictably weak and easily tarnished," the boy said, watching the soldiers with a respectful amount of awe. "Cry and abandon yourself, here," he continued. "This is turpentine."

I looked closer at the soldiers and saw that each of them was equipped with an insectoid gas mask, with a flexible trunk at the base that wormed its way, unsettlingly, deep into their bellies.

I had wanted to see the inside of the castle. I was so taken aback by the incredible conformity of the guard, that I imagined something amazing and rare and valuable must have been contained inside.

"You would have seen nothing but distance in those halls," the boy said, peppering his words with annoyance and anger. "You could die a hundred times over without taking a single step," he said. "There's nobody there but sad, sad Charon anyways."

III. INFERNO

Finally, the boy showed me Hell, the gate of which, an iron door not unlike a solitary cell's, was flung wide open.

There was no heat and no cold. There was nothing but a fog of wet air, crystalline and painful to breathe, ruby and lit from somewhere into something akin to being inside a glowing red neon tube. The illumination was appropriately sinister and it cast both the boy and me in a creepily harsh and ghastly radiance. The red reflected unpleasantly in his dark eyes. He saw me looking at him and felt the need to speak again.

"This is claustrophobia's home," he said. "We truly mean it when we advise the abandonment of hope."

We traveled amongst the glow, and I became accustomed, swiftly, to the screeches of things, millions of flavors of it, all in terrible volumes and sick pitches. There was a surfeit of pain, here, which was wrenched from every inch of the place. Even the ground beneath us, smoldering cooled lava, seemed to groan in misery with our every footfall. It felt correct, as if this had to be this way. It didn't feel like Hell had a choice in its endeavors in the least.

We came upon a creaking tower, a black and red twisted thing spiking through the crown of a city sized skull. Inside we found a throne room and the Prince of Hell, himself.

"Be aware of razors and stinging nettles," the boy told me, his head fallen backwards and away from everything we were walking toward.

Upon the throne, the muscled and classic figure of Satan sat regally, all tight crimson flesh, and a bald long head in possession of two snarled and thick creeping ivy horns. Fangs slipped in angry white shreds from his lips, and his eyes pulsed with the electricity of a world running on the power of sin and decay.

Next to him, in a throne of her own, was the beautiful Queen of Hell, blonde and emerald eyed and sitting patiently and demurely in a velvety green dress. She looked pleasant and powerful, a balancing force to counteract the pure infernal tendencies of her royal groom.

Chained to an onyx post between them was a large and black and gray wolfhound with a maw full of sharp bitter teeth and eyes even redder than the Devil's.

That dog spoke to me, then.

And as he did, his face shifted, slow and sickeningly, a time lapse film of maggots eating rot away. His features became human and ominous, a wise and plotting sort of countenance that threw its own strange light upon the red red depths of Hell.

"The king you see won't answer to anybody, but he rules as a pet's puppet," the boy told me, gripping my shoulder with unintentional force. "There is more there than could be tackled by a fallen man or a fallen seraph, and it's clean spires are proof enough of that."

And with that, we had completed it.

"Remember it," the boy told me, "and when you are hinted at to do so, draw it out from the tap and let anyone who wishes it drink from that golden cup."

He walked away into the darkness of the red clouds, and said, "And know that you were not meant to understand it."

THE END.

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