Johnny Wraith Stories

Hades’ Gates are not guarded. You won’t find Cerberus, a hydra, or a band of skeleton warriors trying to stop you from getting into the place. In fact, there are no obstructions or locked gates to Hades. There are no barriers to entering the Mouth of Hell. You just walk right in. Everyone is welcome, living or dead, though there is only one place where the living may enter, and only a guide can get you there. My guide, as you have seen, was the scorpion. Funny I call him a guide. After all, he did throw me into a canvass sack, tie it shut, and carry me a distance before dropping me off at the entryway. I suppose it doesn’t matter whether we make it to Hell through a guide or via a courier. What is important is that we make it there.

I tied the canvass sack’s string around my waist, took a few breaths, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled into the little hole in the ground. There was not enough room to stand, so I had to keep crawling. An eerie, gray light somehow glowed from the jagged walls of the twisting passageway, so I was just able to see which direction to clamber. It was so cold, my teeth were chattering and I couldn’t feel my hands, feet, lips, or ears, but I kept going. It seemed I was slowly descending, and I kept going. If I had to guess, I crawled nearly a mile into the earth before finding what appeared to be an end to the tunnel. In the ground I discovered a little wooden trapdoor. I bounced on it, tried to pry it open with my fingers, knocked on it to see if someone might open it from below. Nothing. Finally, I found a little wire loop sticking out of the wall and gave it a pull.

The trapdoor opened!

I dropped straight into nothingness, pure black nothingness. I fell. I fell for a long time. I fell. At first, the horror of suddenly plummeting into a pit with no bottom in sight, an abyss, made me shut my eyes tight and yell until all my air was spent. Something about having my stomach thrown into my throat made it impossible to refrain from screaming as loud as I could, like a girl, over and over again. At some point I pissed and shit in the canvass sack I was wearing. It was quite a drop. It was quite a dump. I tumbled, and screamed, tumbled and screamed.

Eventually, I realized how ridiculous I was being, so I came to my senses, straightened out, and opened my eyes.

All around me, what appeared to be souls of the dead were swirling. They were holding out their hands to me in supplication. I had always been afraid of ghosts, but it is amazing how you overcome your fear of everything else once you have come to terms with the fact you are freefalling to your death in an abyss.

“Hey buddy,” said a fat man in a panama hat, “do you have anything to eat?”

“I want my daughter back! I was young when I gave her away! Please give her back to me! Please!” cried an old woman.

“He went to prison because I lied! I’m the one who stole the money!” confessed a man in a fancy suit.

“Sorry, I can’t help any of you. All I have is shit in my pants, and regrets I just pulled the wrong wire.”

The desperate souls made sour faces and abandoned me. I kept falling.

I don’t know if I fell for days or weeks, but I had long given up hope of splattering at the bottom when a powerful gust of wind swept me up and began carrying me somewhere. When I looked down, I discovered my body was in the grasp of a monstrous, ethereal hand. After being carried a short way, a little wooden tavern came into view in the distance. It was hovering midair in the abyss, among the absolute darkness coming from every direction. Through open windows and the swiveling doors, a warm fire glowed. The hand flew me to the entrance. The swiveling doors flew open, and I was gently put down on the welcome mat. The hand disappeared.

“God damn! What’s that smell?” demanded the bartender. Like the best bartenders, he was a surly man, balding, and had a distinctly protruding belly that stretched against his greasy, white apron.

I looked around, and discovered I was the only other person there.

“Sorry. I shit in my pants.”

“What the hell you do that for?”

“I fell into this hole and it scared the shit out of me.”

The bartender grinned to his bushy sideburns. “I’d shit too if I fell so far. Tell you what,” he pointed a fat finger, “through that door is the washroom. Go wash up. Rinse out that damn sack you’re wearing and hang it by the fire to dry. I have a clean apron for you. I wouldn’t leave here with only an apron on though, so stay a while. Have a few drinks. As you can imagine, in Hades you won’t be a virgin long if you’re running around with your bare ass showing.” 

I returned wearing an apron and smelling of lye soap.

“I’d ask you your drink, but here we only serve various devils’ brews you ain’t never heard of and can’t say,” explained the barkeep.

“What do you recommend?”

“Depends on what you need.”

“I need to get out of here.”

“There ain’t no drink for that.”

“Then how do I get out of here?”

“You just have to fall to the bottom, get up, and start walking. There’s only one way in and one way out. There’s no way to get lost, and no one is going to stop you from leaving this damned hole. Just remember, along the way there will be a lot of places where you’ll want to set up camp and stay forever, like at the ale lakes, the shroom fields, or one of the pits of flesh.”

“You gotta be kidding me! Ale lakes, shroom fields, and flesh pits?”

“I’m kidding,” winked the bartender after a pause. “But there are powerful temptations here, and no one has ever turned his back on all of them. That’s why no one has ever left Hades. It’s something about the personalities that fall into this pit in the first place, because everyone is free to leave. But nobody ever has.”

“That’s what I’ve heard. Sounds like I’m in for trouble. Give me your strongest drink, and make it a double!”

As I put down round after round and took back my warmth, I pondered. I must say that though I can’t pronounce what I was drinking, it was strong and didn’t taste bad, like aged whiskey from a foreign land. What did it mean to find myself falling into a strange place? Maybe it was like being born? Isn’t being born like falling into a strange place, you’ve never been before? Living life is like falling into an abyss and you can’t see where you’re going. Could smashing on the rocks at the bottom be like getting to the end of life and dying? If not death, what is at the bottom? When we are born, we are shitting in our pants, and throughout life we shit in our pants a time or two. Sometimes strange spirits plead to us for things we cannot give. Other times we run around with our asses hanging out, but here and there we find solace. A gentle hand sweeps us up and carries us to a safe place. There we clean ourselves and find a fire’s warmth. Then we must go on. We jump back into the abyss. Once more the darkness swallows us up and we are falling. Adam and the barkeep claim there is a way out. It is a one-way path to the exit, but no one has ever chosen to exit. It is something more than suicide.

And so I had my last drink, gave back the apron and put my dried shorts back on, took a deep breath, walked out the swiveling doors, and jumped back in.