Spirit Wars by Mon D Rea

playing
false!”
    Sephtimus grabs the fershee’s gory cheek
with bone-crushing tightness. I can only whimper as my brain dimly registers
the narrowing of my sight.
    “You shall tutor me on your ways and accompany me to your world.
Or you can go back to the Seventh Circle and be skinned and gutted by the Harpies
every minute of every day! Till all the light of the universes shrivels up and
sighs!”
    With the sound of what should be a bloodcurdling scream but
drowned out by Death's heartless laughter, a whole new ear – still horribly
alien – emerges from my bruised and ragged flesh. Like some mutant newborn,
this quivering fan of spines and skin is matted with mercurial blood. At last I
slip into blessed nothingness.  

  Chapter VII: The
Reluctant Reaper
    God, why is this happening to me? I rack my brain for answers. I
know now that there’s life after death and I’m in hell for being sinful and
taking my own life. But of all seven billion people in the world, or the
hundreds of billion people who have died from the beginning of time till now,
why did Death choose me to be his plaything?
    It feels utterly empty pondering the weight of these statistics.
It’s like I’m flickering between two planes. The first a vast wasteland, the
post-apocalyptic world in my vision where I’m the only human not allowed to die,
and the second, the familiar world indeed populated by billions of people but
not a single one able to hear my voice or feel my touch.
    I have slept fitfully, tormented by vivid, psychotic nightmares
that I know are poor imitations of the real horrors that await me when I
succumb to consciousness.  I’m still in shock from everything; all the
irreparable psychological damage. There’s also this creeping feeling of having
made a mistake and now paying for it far beyond human capacity.
    Of course I’ve done many other stupid things in life, bringing
harm to myself and sometimes to others, but everything just pales in comparison
to this. It’s like what the Angel of Death himself said, all a human can do is
face the consequences of his own actions. Still I can’t help wondering how
different things might've been had I not died when I did. Being always alone,
depressed and scared I could’ve probably borne or spent my whole life trying
to, but eternity’s a phenomenon whose scope and limits I can never dream to
grasp, let alone survive.
    Having lived in a predominantly Catholic country, I’ve been preached
at, laden with guilt and warned of a realm that arranges the eternal punishment
of the wicked. Who could've thought such a place had any basis in fact? My
flesh crawls and my insides chill every time I think of what other revelations
lie in store on this topsy-turvy zoo tour, where all the showcased animals were
once human, only they can't remember anymore how it was being anything but
beasts.
    I could pass out again just thinking of my own sentence: to be
thrown at the mercy of potbellied, winged viragos, the infamous Harpies, every
waking moment of insomniac death. Like I thought at the way station, there’s a
thin line between real men and sissies in the face of hellfire.
    And my body! It takes a great deal of positivity to hold back
despair at the sight and feel of my wet and slimy flesh, as though all the time
I was emerging from a moss-covered lake. Sephtimus
has begun calling me by a foreign name, too, which at first sounded Egyptian to
me but which my psychic connection explains is actually Welsh. It’s spelled
Cyhyraeth and is pronounced Tuh-huhreth , meaning “specter” or
“death-portent.”
    I also learn that a fershee, like its female counterpart the
banshee, is a type of wailing spirit.
    S uicide’s not an option simply because you can’t kill
someone who’s already dead. I’ve basically landed myself in the ultimate
prison, a place akin to a mental institute where all the doors have no knobs to
turn. Or there are simply no doors.
    The only thing that holds me together in this